Research Engineer

About us

Forus is building an AI-powered network that connects doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to accelerate new science to patients.

Our platform automates the complexity between a doctor prescribing a medicine and a patient starting treatment, including insurance coverage, financial assistance, and supply chain navigation. We provide this support free to doctors and patients, helping them get life-changing medicine faster, cheaper, and easier. The resulting network enables biopharma companies to design better research, launch new drugs more effectively, and invest in harder-to-treat conditions.

Forus has exceptional product-market fit and is growing rapidly through organic adoption:

Accelerating scale: We already support patients across more than 85% of ZIP codes and partner with 9 of top 15 largest biopharma companies in the world.

AI-native, durable model: Our business becomes stronger as AI improves, as every new doctor, patient, and partner makes the network more valuable.

Backing to build for the long term: We raised $300M+ from leading investors to build an exceptional team and unlock the full scale of the opportunity.

Our number one priority is scaling to market demand. We are looking for individuals who are high horsepower, high throughput, and hyper resourceful to help us increase capacity and grow. We move fast and need to move faster.

If we succeed, science will be the only limit to medicine.

All full-time roles are in person in New York.

About the role

As a Research Engineer on our team, you will work on real production use cases of LLMs and other ML techniques to solve business problems and create groundbreaking AI applications. The role requires that you develop a deep understanding of our product surface area and what drives our business, such that you can operate and drive impact both cross-functionally and independently. You will have end-to-end responsibility for projects, including definition, design, development, launch, and success––this includes ensuring your output has the expected impact on user growth, operational efficiency, or revenue generation.

This is a demanding role, with a high level of autonomy and responsibility. You will be expected to "act like an owner" and commit yourself to Forus' success. If you are low-ego, hungry to learn, and excited about intense, impactful work that drives both company growth and accelerated career progression, we want to hear from you.

If you join, you will:

Scope and spearhead AI augmentation and automation projects across our product surface area, including: Unintuitive classifications, Data extraction and summarization, Precise content generation, Reference-based search and question answering, Process outcome prediction, Probabilistic triggering of workflows, and Multimodal LLM-powered bots

Stay on top of emerging AI methods and guide decisions around which models and techniques to adopt––including evaluating when to use open-source models, proprietary models, and custom fine-tuning approaches

Establish research strategies for various AI methods, including rigorous experimentation and evaluation protocols that account for accuracy, consistency, interpretability, and real-world impact

Develop novel algorithms and techniques to address core research problems in natural language processing, data extraction, and autonomous reasoning (e.g., few-shot learning, agentic reasoning, and multi-modal interaction)

We need your help to:

Decipher and automate complex, branching workflows for insurance coverage, affordability programs, and fulfillment

Combining AI/ML approaches to achieve high precision document classification, unstructured data extraction, and reference-based question answering

Automating multi-step, path-dependent processes, using a combination of RPA/scraping approaches to navigate and operate third-party platforms

Building a state machine that drives system decisions and handles failure modes across a set of processes that are technically independent but practically intertwined

Scale across a growing range of drug classes, patient populations, and provider markets

Making our data and ML pipelines robust to variation and inconsistency in input data formats (e.g., clinical documentation structure and style)

Leveraging empirical data to build and continuously update our understanding of opaque external systems (e.g., insurance company policies)

Creating consumer-grade experiences for patients, physicians, and other users that incorporate intuitive AI-powered workflows

Use our network to help biopharma partners accelerate drug development, launch, and access

Translating large volumes of heterogeneous data into reliable insights, informing decisions like clinical indication selection, launch markets, and insurer negotiations

Developing predictive and simulation models to forecast outcomes such as clinical trial site performance, drug adoption rates, and the impact of rebates/subsidies

Using real-time data and direct engagement channels to enroll criteria-matching patients and physicians in clinical studies and access programs

We’re looking for you if you have:

Strong programming skills and general Computer Science knowledge

Research background in ML/NLP, demonstrated through publications in top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP) or significant open-source contributions

Experience working on complex ML problems (e.g., data-efficient learning, reasoning agents, or multi-step workflows) and deploying those solutions in production environments

Deep understanding of modern ML methods, including transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, reinforcement learning, and multimodal models — with proficiency in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX

Strong written and verbal communication that allows you to be an effective participant in both internal debates and external relationships

Track record of moving quickly, finding shortcuts, and going to unreasonable lengths to deliver on goals

High NPS with your former teammates

This is a list of ideal qualifications for this position. If you don't meet every single one of them, you should still consider applying! We’re excited to work with people from underrepresented backgrounds, and we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.

Working with us

Forus is based in New York, with our full team working out of a beautiful and spacious office in SoHo.

We run as a high-trust environment with high autonomy, which requires that everyone is fully competent and operates in line with our principles:

Do the math. Be rigorous, assume nothing. Break problems down and reason from the ground up. Stay open to changing your mind.

Resourceful optimism. Assume problems are solvable. Be audacious. Resist false constraints and push beyond the obvious before deciding.

Spit it out. Speak directly, invite critique, avoid equivocation. We want right answers, not comfortable ones. All killer, no filler.

Raise the bar. Hold a high standard for your pace and execution, and elevate the performance of the team around you. Mamba mentality.

Fight for users. Start with users’ realities, not ours. Resist optimizing for internal convenience over user outcomes.

We provide competitive compensation with meaningful equity (for full-time employees) . Everyone who joins will be a major contributor to our success, and we reflect this through ownership and pay.

We also provide rich benefits to ensure you can focus on creating impact (for full-time employees) :

Fully covered medical, vision, and dental insurance.

Memberships for One Medical, Talkspace, Teladoc, and Kindbody.

Unlimited paid time off (PTO) and 16 weeks of parental leave.

401K plan setup, FSA option, commuter benefits, and DashPass.

Lunch at the office every day and Dinner at the office after 6:30 pm.

Our salary ranges are based on paying