Founding Engineer
Pear VC
Paxos Health Software Engineer
We are a fast-growing early-stage AI startup with venture capital funding and a long runway. We have multiple B2B customers, including one of the largest companies in our customer-space. Our team has 5 full-time employees and a few part-time contractors and interns.
The future of medical treatment has arrived, but it's not evenly distributed. Innovative medical technologies are getting FDA approvals every year, but it can take up to a decade for US health insurers to actually cover those treatments for patients, meaning they're blocked from life-changing or life-saving care. We use LLMs and AI agents to fight for coverage on individual patient cases to help them get the care they need. Our AI reads all of a patient's medical documents and the health insurer's policy to come up with the best possible argument about why an upcoming treatment is needed, and then it generates all the paperwork and follows up with the health insurer with voice AI calls. Our customers are manufacturers who have created innovative treatments, and our mission is to get patients access to these life-changing technologies.
Job Responsibilities
Feature Development: Design, build, and iterate on end-to-end product features (frontend, backend, or both) using modern frameworks and cloud services.
Execution & Accountability: Turn product goals into scoped milestones, and keep the team unblocked and on-time.
Product Collaboration: Work with founders, design, and other engineers to translate user needs into simple, scalable solutions.
Debugging & Maintenance: Diagnose bugs, performance issues, and edge cases in a fast-moving production environment, delivering timely fixes and improvements. Add monitoring/alerts, write tests, and handle incidents with fast root-cause analysis and pragmatic fixes.
DevOps & Platform: Contribute to CI/CD, infra basics on AWS, and observability (dashboards, traces, logs).
Improve Our Generative AI Capabilities. Foundational model training and fine-tuning won't be necessary, but we do a lot of vertical-specific LLM orchestration.
Team & Culture: Raise the bar via code reviews, documentation, and mentoring; help interview future teammates and shape engineering norms.
Qualifications
Required:
4+ years of software engineering experience, including full-stack experience and experience on a high-performing engineering team.
Python proficiency
JavaScript proficiency
Entrepreneurial spirit. We're looking for someone self-starting, scrappy, comfortable with ambiguity, and with a growth mindset.
Ability to work independently. We will collaborate closely with you, but you should be able to build new features on your own.
Relentlessly detail-oriented. You'll build healthcare tools where trust and quality are nonnegotiable, and the standard is higher than in most industries.
Ideal, but not required:
Experience working with LLMs across large volumes of documents
Experience at an early-stage startup
Kubernetes and/or Docker experience
TypeScript experience
Node and/or React experience
SQL experience
Shell scripting experience / familiarity with *nix systems
Tech Stack
We use TypeScript in our frontend and Python for pretty much everything else. We run in a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, and use various AWS services (S3, Bedrock, etc) where it makes sense. As a result, we're looking for someone with the following skills and experience.
Compensation
We offer salary that is competitive with other startups, and a very generous equity package (which you'll get at a lower valuation before we raise our next funding round!). The final offer may vary depending on experience, skills, and role scope. We provide health, dental, and vision insurance.
Location
We offer hybrid (at least 3 days per week in the office) work-arrangements in New York City or Toronto.
More on the Company
Vibes: You can expect a fast-paced, intense, dynamic, and exciting working environment where everyone has strategic ownership.
Paxos Health is a company founded out of Stanford and backed by leading VCs. The team has engineering and product management backgrounds in the medtech industry (Medtronic) and top technology companies (Meta and Microsoft), as well as founding experience across multiple startups and healthcare nonprofits. Haley, our CEO, spent over six years at Medtronic in engineering, product management, and business development roles. While pursuing her MBA at Stanford, she met Alex, who has experience building technology at Meta, Microsoft, and as a startup founder. He also successfully overturned a $40,000 denial for his own surgery by writing his own appeals. Malcolm, our third co-founder, also successfully overturned a $50,000 denial for his own case, and had previously founded and led a healthcare nonprofit. These experiences inspired them to co-found Paxos Health to empower more patients to navigate the complexities of healthcare access. Ben, our founding engineer, holds an M. Eng. from Cornell, previously built his own ML startup, and has many years of experience with building innovative software products. We're also supported by a handful of contractors around the world.
Our story: In 2021, Alex was denied by his health insurance company for a $40,000 medical procedure, and an anonymous Reddit user who also had previously overturned his own insurance denial helped Alex win his appeal. Later, at Stanford, Alex met Haley, and they decided to start a venture to help patients navigate health insurance appeals, driven by Alex's personal experience. Soon, Alex and Haley discovered another Stanford student was working on a similar project. It turns out, that Stanford student was the same anonymous Reddit user that had helped Alex in 2021: Malcolm. They decided to join forces and have been working together on Paxos Health ever since. After working directly with patients and successfully overturning denials, the team began receiving outreach from medical technology companies seeking help with patient access to their innovative treatments. Haley, our CEO, brings deep experience to this area, having spent seven years at Medtronic. Recognizing a broader need, Paxos expanded its mission - building tools to help more patients access cutting-edge treatments and receive the best care possible.