We are a medical AI research lab embedded inside one of India's largest hospitals. Five machine-learning engineers, one PI, and a growing queue of doctors who want to build things with us. Our models are trained on procedures performed down the hall, and our papers are aimed at problems that fill the waiting rooms downstairs.

We need the person who holds it all together: part program manager, part chief of staff, part translator between clinicians and engineers. Someone organized enough to run the machinery and sharp enough to notice when the machinery is producing the wrong thing.

This is not a corporate job. It is mission work, at academic pay, with an unusual amount of responsibility and an unusual amount of meaning.

Role & responsibilities

You will be the operational spine of the lab. Concretely, a typical fortnight looks like:

- Running the engineering cadence. Daily stand-ups with the ML team, sprint planning, retrospectives keeping five engineers (plus student researchers) unblocked, prioritized, and honest about progress.
- Running the clinical interface. Doctors join us every two weeks. You prepare those meetings, capture what the clinicians actually need (which is not always what they first say), and translate it into requirements engineers can build against then translate results back into language clinicians trust.
- Owning the plans. Turning ambiguous research goals ("can we predict severity from these videos?") into milestones, owners, and timelines and updating them when reality disagrees, which it will.
- Protecting the deadlines. Conference submissions run this lab's calendar. You track them, work back from them, and raise the alarm early when a project is quietly drifting off course.
- Sharpening the output. Reviewing manuscripts, reports,



and proposals for clarity and consistency. You are often the last set of eyes before something leaves the building.
- Asking the uncomfortable question. When a result looks too good, when two people are measuring different things, when "almost done" has been almost done for three weeks noticing is your job. You don't need to solve the technical problem; you need to make sure it can't hide.

This role is for you if

- You genuinely enjoy bringing order to ambiguity plans, owners, dates and you can't help thinking critically about the content of what you're organizing.
- You can hold your own in a room with surgeons and in a room with engineers, and you notice when they're using the same word to mean different things.
- You want your work to matter in a way you can point to: published research, tools aimed at real patients, a lab that clinicians keep coming back to.
- You are motivated by mission and growth more than by title and salary. This is a nonprofit academic environment. We are transparent about that.

This role is probably not for you if

- You're looking for a pure people-management or pure administrative position this is a doing role, and some of the doing is unglamorous.
- You need heavyweight corporate structure to operate. We are small, fast, informal, and growing; you will often be the one creating the structure.




- Reading an ML evaluation discussion or a clinical labeling debate sounds like something you'd prefer to sit out. You don't need to be an expert in either — but you must be willing and able to follow both.

Required:

- Bachelor's or master's degree in engineering, computer science, biomedical/life sciences, healthcare, management, or a related field
- Experience coordinating multidisciplinary, technical, research, or healthcare projects
- Working literacy in machine-learning workflows — data collection, annotation, training, evaluation, validation. You won't build models, but you must be able to follow (and question) a discussion about them.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; robust attention to detail and follow-through
- The ability to turn broad, ambiguous objectives into clear, actionable plans

Preferred:

- 3+ years managing technical or research programs, ideally with time in healthcare or another regulated environment
- Familiarity with academic publishing: conference cycles, submissions, revisions, camera-ready deadlines
- Experience with Agile practices and tools (Jira, Notion, ClickUp, Slack, etc.)
- Familiarity with research ethics, clinical-study processes, or patient-data privacy

How to apply

Complete the take-home exercise here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mG_bi3DwqAsyPKhL6ryxppaiTjM-1czu3kl6_vCXYxo/edit?usp=sharing

It is designed to take no more than 3 hours, and it is the heart of our process — we care far more about how you think through a messy project than about any line on a CV. Email your completed exercise with your CV attached to [email protected].

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to a conversation to walk through their submission and how they'd approach the real thing.

📌 Medical AI Research Program Manager (Kerala)
🏢 Maitri-Labs
📍 Kerala