---
title: 'Founding Research Engineer at Nolla Health'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-research-engineer-nolla-health-new-york-xyt7kyzqj6zc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Founding Research Engineer at Nolla Health

- **Company:** Nolla Health
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $180k–$240k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nollahealth/ca4faa24-beaa-46b6-b86e-042342c59434

## Job description

The mission Nolla is building AI doctors so that top-quality healthcare is accessible to everyone. Nolla Derm is the #1 medical skincare treatment app in the U.S. App Store. We've treated thousands of acne patients in the U.S., scanned 1% of Norway's population for skin cancer, and our in-house clinical models are state of the art on clinical benchmarks. We just launched NollaMD, our urgent care app, and we're building dedicated specialty apps for conditions like women’s health. We’ve raised $6.5M from General Catalyst and other strategic investors.

## The role

We have built our own clinical benchmarks, post-trained on them, and produced models that beat frontier performance on clinical tasks. We are in a unique position of both delivering care to real patients and training the models that deliver it. You’ll work on our evals and harnesses, build the data loop with clinicians that feeds them, and lead where they go next. You'll work directly with the founding team and with our post-training partners, and your work reaches patients immediately. This is a hands-on role: you will write code most days, design studies, and be the author of record on what we publish.

## What you'll build

Evals and benchmarks

- Design and maintain the benchmarks we use to judge clinical accuracy, safety, and documentation quality
- Extend them to our agentic system: tool use, long-horizon tasks that span many visits, memory of a patient's history, uploaded records, labs, and escalation behavior

Graders and harnesses

- Build the grading stack: deterministic checks, rubric graders, and LLM judges calibrated against clinician ratings
- Improve the production harness the product runs on

Data loop with clinicians

- Turn real, consented cases into eval cases and training examples, with clinician review, de-identification, and provenance built in
- Run the clinician review workflows that produce rubrics, labels, and feedback at scale

Research

- Lead our clinical evaluations from protocol through publication, and publish our benchmarks for the field
- Collaborate with post-training on reward design and data curation, and run experiments where it helps

## What you bring

- You have built eval infrastructure for LLM systems that other people depended on
- You have opinions about contamination, difficulty calibration, judge bias, and reward hacking
- You can write a paper. Authorship on empirical ML work, ideally with a human comparison or a benchmark release
- You are excited to work with some of the best physicians in the country and turn their judgment into model performance
- You've worked on small teams and built things from zero

Bonus points

- Clinical AI evaluation experience: rubric-based health benchmarks, simulated-patient studies, agentic clinical benchmarks
- Post-training experience (RLHF, DPO, GRPO or similar)
- Experience with multimodal models
- Familiarity with eval and environment frameworks such as Inspect, Verifiers, or Harbor

## Role logistics, compensation & benefits

- Role Type: Engineering
- Salary: $180,000–$240,000, based on experience
- Job Type: Full-time
- Work Setup: In-person, New York City
- Equity: Meaningful equity, commensurate with experience
- Health Insurance: Medical, dental, and vision
- HSA/FSA: Eligible
- Time Off: Flexible, unlimited vacation
- Additional Perks: Meal stipends, team retreats
- Work Hours: Flexible but demanding. We're building something that matters
- Growth: Founding team members step into expanded roles as we scale

## About Nolla Health

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Nolla Health is an AI-powered skin health platform that combines proprietary AI models with clinician oversight to provide personalized, asynchronous treatment plans for skin conditions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Luis Wenus (CEO) and Luis R. Soenksen (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Healthtech / AI-powered dermatology and skincare
- **Target customers**: B2C – consumers seeking treatment for acne, redness, wrinkles, and other skin concerns
- **Mission statement**: “Care should be continuous and easy to navigate” – building a system that helps people understand what’s going on and what to do next [nollahealth.com](https://www.nollahealth.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Nolla Skin (formerly Nolla Acne)**: A mobile app (iOS) that offers daily AI-powered face scans, clinician-reviewed treatment plans, and prescription medication delivery. Subscription-based model. Rated #1 Skin Treatment app on the App Store with 7,000+ reviews and a 4.9-star rating [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nolla-health).
- **Nolla MD**: Asynchronous clinician chat service for general health concerns. A licensed U.S. provider reviews the case and responds via message for $39. Currently in development for broader specialty care [nollahealth.com](https://www.nollahealth.com/).
- **Medical Skincare (in development)**: A skincare app that adapts to the user’s changing needs, with personalized product recommendations [nollahealth.com](https://www.nollahealth.com/).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $4.5M (Seed round, October 2025) led by General Catalyst [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nolla-health)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst (lead), plus two other unnamed investors
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Expanded from acne-only to full skincare (Nolla Skin) in May 2026 [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nolla-health)
  - Monthly website traffic of ~17,800 visits, growing 1.7% month-over-month [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nolla-health)
  - Strong App Store traction: #1 Skin Treatment app, 4.9 stars, 7,000+ reviews
  - Small but focused team (8 employees) with presence in the US, Philippines, and Poland [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nolla-health)

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI + clinical oversight**: Every diagnosis and prescription is reviewed by a licensed U.S. medical provider, combining speed with trust [nollahealth.com](https://www.nollahealth.com/).
- **Continuous care model**: Daily AI skin scans and monthly treatment updates create a compounding clinical relationship that improves over time.
- **Data moat**: Proprietary AI trained on real clinical outcomes, with daily user scans generating a unique longitudinal dataset.
- **HIPAA compliant and privacy-focused**: Strong emphasis on data security and patient privacy [nollahealth.com](https://www.nollahealth.com/).

## Strategic Focus
- **Expand beyond acne**: Nolla Skin now addresses redness, wrinkles, and hyperpigmentation, with plans to add more specialty care services.
- **Build the “personal doctor” vision**: Integrating Nolla MD for general health and expanding the platform to cover end-to-end care.
- **Scale AI capabilities**: Hiring a Founding AI Engineer to advance the core predictive and diagnostic models [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/nolla-health).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Founded by doctors, engineers, and researchers – a mission-driven team focused on making healthcare accessible and understandable.
- **Work environment**: In-office for engineering and product roles in New York City (with a second office in Norway). Some roles (e.g., Social Media Coordinator) are remote/contract [nollahealth.com](https://www.nollahealth.com/careers).
- **Engineering focus**: Early-stage startup with a small team (8 people) – opportunity to have significant impact on the product and technical direction. Current open roles include Founding AI Engineer and Product Designer [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/nolla-health).
- **Perks**: Not explicitly listed, but typical of a seed-stage healthtech startup: equity, direct work with founders, and the chance to shape a product that already has strong user traction.

## Sources
1. [nollahealth.com – Homepage](https://www.nollahealth.com/)
2. [nollahealth.com – About](https://www.nollahealth.com/about)
3. [nollahealth.com – Careers](https://www.nollahealth.com/careers)
4. [builtin.com – Nolla Health Profile](https://builtin.com/company/nolla-health)
5. [linkedin.com – Nolla Health Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nolla-health)

## Other roles at Nolla Health

- [Clinical Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/clinical-operations-lead-nolla-health-new-york-94ar27zvgxb4) — New York, NY
- [Founding Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-designer-nolla-health-new-york-bp0zf49fq6d8) — New York, NY
- [Clinical Content Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/clinical-content-lead-nolla-health-new-york-nkk2d5ah0jf1) — New York, NY
- [Founding AI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-ai-engineer-nolla-health-new-york-dtvx43b17smy) — New York, NY