---
title: 'AI Engineer at Collate'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ai-engineer-collate-san-francisco-qjvkfcb0859f'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# AI Engineer at Collate

- **Company:** Collate
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-01-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/collate/377f2cf3-6285-42c1-8130-dd3dd2c866cb

## Job description

## About Collate

Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.

Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.

We’re an elite team, with $125M in funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, CRV, Conviction, Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join an early-stage company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.

## About the Role

We’re looking for an AI Engineer to help build and productionize the models and systems that power Collate’s products. You’ll work at the intersection of machine learning, software engineering, and product — turning cutting-edge research into reliable, user-facing capabilities.

This is an opportunity to shape how advanced AI is applied in Life sciences — a space where performance, safety, and trust matter as much as innovation. As one of the first AI-focused engineers at Collate, you’ll define the standards for how we evaluate, and deploy models that directly impact drug  and medical device development.

## What You’ll Do

- Prompt optimization, red-teaming, and improving robustness of LLMs for life-science NLP applications within Collate’s products.
- Build pipelines and infrastructure to deploy AI systems reliably, safely, and at scale.
- Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to translate user needs into AI-driven features.
- Develop evaluation frameworks to ensure models are accurate, fair, and trustworthy in real-world life science settings.
- Experiment rapidly, while balancing iteration speed with the rigor required for high-stakes applications.
- Create tools and workflows that make AI development more efficient across the team.

## What We’re Looking For

- Hands-on experience building and deploying ML/AI systems in production.
- Strong foundation in deploying search and retrieval systems and NLP applications.
- Ability to bridge research and engineering — from prototyping models to shipping them in user-facing products.
- Comfort working in an early-stage startup where ambiguity is high and ownership is expected.
- Motivation to apply AI to life sciences in a way that prioritizes reliability, safety, and impact.

Why Join Collate?

Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.

Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.

Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.

Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career-defining impact.

The base salary range for this role is depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco) AI Engineer: $158-215K; Senior AI Engineer: $188-275K; Staff AI Engineer: $228-310K; Principal AI Engineer: $275-325K

## About Collate

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Collate is a unified platform for data discovery, observability, and governance, powered by OpenMetadata, that helps data teams build trust in data and accelerate AI and analytics.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, $10M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Saratoga, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Suresh Srinivas (Co-Founder & CEO); an unnamed Co-Founder & CTO (former architect at Uber, Hortonworks, and contributor to Apache Kafka/Storm)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Data management, metadata management, data governance, data observability
- **Target customers**: B2B – data teams at Fortune 500 enterprises and innovative startups
- **Mission or purpose**: “Take the chaos out of the lives of data practitioners by providing a single pane view of all your data, and empowering collaboration.” [getcollate.io/about](https://www.getcollate.io/about)

## Products & Services
- **Collate Platform (SaaS)**: A unified semantic metadata graph that connects data assets, pipelines, metrics, and business concepts. Enables data discovery, observability, governance, and collaboration.
- **Collate 2.0 (AI for Data Platform)**: Adds agentic automation and orchestration, a Context Layer (Context Center, Memory, Persona-Based Context, Context API/MCP Tooling), AI Analytics (natural language to governed dashboards with verifiable reasoning), and AI Studio for custom agents. [linkedin.com/company/collateinc](https://linkedin.com/company/collateinc)
- **OpenMetadata (Open Source)**: The leading open standard for metadata management, created by the Collate team. Drives an active community of thousands globally.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $10M (Series A, August 2025, led by Venrock)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Venrock (lead Series A), Unusual Ventures (seed backer)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 83.8% year-over-year to 57 employees; distributed across 7 countries (India, United States, Spain, United Kingdom, South Africa, France, Italy); active job postings; 12,600+ LinkedIn followers (+155% year-over-year); launched Collate 2.0 in August 2026

## Competitive Advantages
- **Built on OpenMetadata**: An open, community-driven standard that ensures interoperability with any data and AI system.
- **Founding team pedigree**: Co-founders from Hortonworks (co-creators of Hadoop), Uber’s data infrastructure, and contributors to Apache Kafka, Storm, Atlas, and Databook.
- **AI-native approach**: Context layer and agentic automation differentiate from legacy governance tools.
- **Strong open-source community**: Thousands of contributors and adopters worldwide.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the AI for Data platform (Collate 2.0), deepening agentic automation and orchestration, expanding the semantic metadata graph, and enabling trusted AI analytics.
- **Growth direction**: Helping organizations move from fragmented metadata to a unified context layer that powers both human and AI data workers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Grow Together” – collaboration-focused, transparent, and customer-obsessed. Small team with no bureaucracy; direct access to founders.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Fully remote company with a strong remote culture; headquarters in Saratoga, CA, and an office in Menlo Park.
- **Notable perks**: Competitive salary and seed-stage equity; medical, dental, and vision insurance; work with smart, motivated peers; opportunity to shape engineering culture as an early employee. [getcollate.io/careers/software-engineer](https://www.getcollate.io/careers/software-engineer)

## Sources
1. [getcollate.io/about](https://www.getcollate.io/about)
2. [getcollate.io/careers](https://www.getcollate.io/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/collateinc](https://linkedin.com/company/collateinc)
4. [jobs.lever.co/collate](https://jobs.lever.co/collate/)
5. [getcollate.io/careers/software-engineer](https://www.getcollate.io/careers/software-engineer)

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