Research about the company - Corti AI

Corti.ai – Interview Preparation Notes

1. Company Research

Mission & Focus

Corti builds next-generation intelligent, robust, and reliable AI systems for healthcare.
Their work spans:

  • Foundational research in generative models and representation learning
  • Applied solutions in speech processing and explainable AI
  • Tools that improve documentation automation, EHR integration, and patient support

Hackathon Use Cases

Examples of solutions built with Corti’s API:

  • Health-ePassport – portable medical history for global use
  • MinSP Assistant – elderly care assistant for instructions and guidance
  • Symptom Capture Companion – voice-based symptom documentation for GPs
  • NurseAssist – intelligent nurse call system with urgency categorization

Culture & Identity

  • Flat organizational structure
  • Trust-centric Scandinavian culture
  • “Ride the comet” mentality – intense but rewarding
  • Purpose-driven work environment
  • Employees often refer to themselves as “Cortians”

2. Key People at Corti

Leadership

  • Lars Maaløe – Co-Founder & CTO

    • PhD in Machine Learning (DTU)
    • Background in generative models, deep learning, and healthcare AI
    • Adjunct Associate Professor at DTU

  • Andreas Cleve Lohmann – CEO

    • Background in Business Administration (CBS)
    • Personal motivation rooted in family healthcare experiences
    • Focused on empowering caregivers with AI tools

Engineering & Product

  • Morten Barklund – Staff Engineer

    • 15+ years in JavaScript/TypeScript, 6+ years in React
    • Author of React Quickly and React in Depth
    • Leads frontend development for healthcare products

  • Henrik Cullen – Director of Product

    • Background in International Business (CBS)
    • Built product teams from early stage to Series A
    • Hands-on with SQL, PowerBI, Mixpanel, React, NodeJS

  • Veselin Ivanov – VP of Engineering

    • Background in Computer Science (University of Copenhagen)
    • Focus on scalable engineering organizations and resilient systems
    • Early career at VMware

  • Jakob Havtorn – Staff R&D Specialist

    • Industrial PhD in Machine Learning (DTU & Corti)
    • Research in multimodal ML (speech, text, images)
    • Published in ICML, ACL, AISTATS, NPJ Digital Medicine

3. My Background & Alignment

Introduction

  • Name: Richard Kasendu
  • Age: 25
  • Education: Software Engineering student at Uppsala University
  • Background:
    • Grew up in Latvia, later moved to Sweden
    • Early interest in computers (first memory: moving files at age 4)
    • Sports (100m sprint) and music (accordion, music school)
    • Work experience in catering and postal services before tech
    • Early IT security experience (helped Swedish train system identify vulnerabilities)

Relevant Experience

  • Zeeds – Built scalable, cloud-based microservices architecture serving 10K+ active users
  • Master Thesis – Focused on explainability in AI, directly relevant to healthcare transparency
  • Agreo (CTO role) – Led platform reliability (99.9% uptime), developer experience, and monitoring

Platform Scale & Performance Achievements

  • High Availability – Maintained 99.9% uptime across production systems at Agreo
  • Concurrent Users – Supported 10,000+ active users with sub-200ms response times at Zeeds
  • Data Processing – Handled millions of daily API requests through optimized microservices architecture
  • Infrastructure Scaling – Reduced deployment times from 45 minutes to under 5 minutes through CI/CD optimization
  • Cost Optimization – Achieved 40% cost reduction through infrastructure rightsizing and monitoring
  • Zero-Downtime Deployments – Implemented blue-green deployment strategies for critical healthcare applications

Leadership & Teamwork

  • Experience in recruitment and managing small teams (developers and non-developers)
  • Established agile deployment processes
  • Strong focus on documentation, presentations, and cross-team communication

Technical Alignment with Corti

  • Platform engineering expertise → matches Corti's sovereign cloud needs
  • Docker & containerization → healthcare-grade deployments
  • Python & Go → aligns with backend services
  • Infrastructure as Code → scalable AI workloads
  • Healthcare technology passion → strong mission alignment

Kubernetes & Container Orchestration Experience

  • Multi-tenant Architecture – Experience designing isolated environments within shared infrastructure
  • Horizontal & Vertical Scaling – Implemented auto-scaling policies for variable workloads at Agreo
  • Container Orchestration – Deployed and managed containerized applications across cloud environments
  • GitOps Practices – Implemented infrastructure-as-code deployments using version-controlled configurations
  • Fault-Resilient Clusters – Built monitoring and alerting systems to ensure platform reliability
  • Service Mesh Understanding – Knowledge of inter-service communication patterns for microservices

Distributed Systems & Infrastructure Experience

  • Message Queues – Experience with event-driven architectures and asynchronous processing
  • Database Systems – Worked with both SQL and NoSQL databases in production environments
  • Elasticsearch – Implemented search and analytics capabilities for large datasets
  • Terraform & IaC – Automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration management
  • CI/CD Pipelines – Built comprehensive deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps
  • Monitoring & Observability – Implemented logging, metrics, and alerting systems for production workloads
  • Load Balancing – Configured high-availability systems with traffic distribution strategies

Security & Compliance Experience

  • GDPR Compliance – Implemented data protection measures and user data rights at Zeeds
  • Data Privacy – Built patient data ownership systems enabling healthcare app unification
  • Security Standards – Implemented authentication, authorization, and audit logging systems
  • Vulnerability Management – Early experience identifying security issues in Swedish transport systems
  • Secure Infrastructure – Deployed encrypted communications and secure data storage solutions
  • Access Control – Implemented role-based access control and principle of least privilege

Developer Experience & Tooling Contributions

  • Internal APIs – Built developer-friendly APIs with comprehensive documentation and SDKs
  • CLI Tools – Created command-line utilities to streamline developer workflows and deployments
  • Automation Tools – Developed scripts and tools to reduce manual operational overhead
  • Documentation Systems – Established technical documentation standards and knowledge sharing practices
  • Developer Onboarding – Created streamlined processes reducing new developer setup time from days to hours
  • Internal Frontends – Built monitoring dashboards and administrative interfaces for platform management

4. Prepared Stories (STAR Method)

Platform Reliability & Scale

  • Scaling to 100M+ Requests – How I architected systems at Zeeds to handle massive concurrent load
  • Zero-Downtime Healthcare Deployments – Implementing blue-green deployments for critical patient systems
  • Building Fault-Resilient Clusters – Creating self-healing infrastructure with automated failover

Developer Experience & Velocity

  • Reducing Deployment Times by 90% – Optimizing CI/CD pipelines from 45 minutes to under 5 minutes
  • Developer Onboarding Acceleration – Creating tools that reduced setup time from days to hours
  • Building Internal APIs & Tools – How I improved developer productivity through better tooling

Security & Compliance

  • Implementing GDPR Compliance – Building patient data ownership systems at Zeeds
  • Healthcare Data Privacy – Ensuring secure, compliant data handling in sensitive environments
  • Vulnerability Discovery – Early experience identifying security issues in critical infrastructure

5. Anticipated Questions

General

  • Who are you? (personal intro above)
  • How do you fit the role? (experience + alignment above)
  • Leadership examples? (recruitment, team management, agile processes)

Behavioral (STAR)

  • Times I showed leadership, problem-solving, or resilience
  • Examples of collaboration across teams
  • Handling high-pressure or mission-critical systems

6. Questions to Ask Corti

Sharp / Challenging

  • Why do engineers leave this company?
  • How do I compare with other candidates you’re considering?
  • If a client had infinite budget, would they choose your competitor instead of you?

Corti-Specific Technical

  • How does Corti balance AI model accuracy with real-time performance in critical healthcare scenarios?
  • What are the biggest platform engineering challenges in scaling sovereign healthcare cloud?
  • How does the platform team support AI researchers in productizing their models?
  • What's your approach to multi-tenant Kubernetes architecture for healthcare workloads?
  • How do you handle 100 million calls per year from an infrastructure perspective?
  • What distributed systems (CockroachDB, Elasticsearch, Kafka) does Corti use and why?

Platform & Culture

  • How does the platform team balance developer velocity with healthcare compliance requirements?
  • What's the biggest developer experience improvement you've implemented recently?
  • How do you approach fault tolerance in a system where downtime affects patient care?

7. Why Healthcare Technology?

Personal Motivation

Healthcare technology represents the intersection of high-impact work and technical excellence. The opportunity to build platforms that directly improve patient outcomes and reduce clinician burnout is deeply meaningful. My experience at Zeeds working on patient data ownership systems showed me how technology can democratize healthcare access while maintaining privacy and security.

Technical Challenge Alignment

Healthcare platforms demand the highest standards of reliability, security, and performance - exactly the challenges that excite me as an engineer. The combination of real-time AI processing, massive scale (100M+ calls), and zero-tolerance for downtime creates the kind of complex technical problems I thrive on solving.

Mission-Driven Culture Fit

Corti's focus on empowering clinicians rather than replacing them aligns perfectly with my belief that technology should augment human expertise. The "ride the comet" mentality and flat organizational structure match my preference for collaborative, high-impact environments where individual contributions directly affect the mission.

Final Notes

  • Emphasize scalability, reliability, and explainability in my past work.
  • Show alignment with Corti’s mission-driven culture and healthcare focus.
  • Use STAR stories to highlight leadership, technical depth, and problem-solving.
  • Mention compliance work (GDPR). Discuss data privacy and how that is important for healthcare. For example when working for Zeeds there was a push towards where the patient owns all their data and there should be a way for healthcare apps to unify and get information more easily.