VP of Engineering

We’re looking for a VP eng to join our exec team. 

PicnicHealth is simplifying clinical research with AI, making it faster and cheaper to get new treatments to patients. We’re bringing a patient-centered, AI-first approach to a $100b market otherwise dominated by old-school, services-driven incumbents.  We’re creating a streamlined operating system for clinical research, built on top of our AI for medical record data in trials and a personal health assistant that keeps patients engaged (NPS 66). 

What we’re looking for in a VP eng

• Startup DNA — we’d love a former founder! 
• Has led 25+ person eng org including managing EMs
• Has built modern enterprise SaaS
• Builds & iterates fast, especially with AI

No healthcare experience needed! We’re looking for a great engineering leader who gets excited about:

• Accelerating drug development to get treatments to patients faster
• Building vertical AI to transform a $100b industry
• Leading a lean, high-velocity engineering org
• Creating great user experiences in complex enterprise software, powered by our combination of AI, software, and services

Over the next 12 months, eng will be focused on:

• Continuing to build out our core platform
• Shipping agentic AI for trial operations
• Scaling revenue with our integrated platform

You’ll be successful if you:

• Know how to run a great engineering org that delivers high quality SaaS for enterprise, with services as part of the model.
• Are an engineering leader, not just someone who runs the engineering org.
• Drive a high velocity org, shipping and iterating fast. This is even more important in an AI world — software development paradigms & product possibilities are changing at an astonishing pace.
• Know and prefer startups. You’ve been a founder, an early employee, or led eng at an early stage company.
• Are a builder at heart who knows great software products come from rapid user-focused development, and will bring that builder's perspective to company strategy
• Set a high bar for eng talent & increase talent density. You like running lean, efficient teams and aren’t motivated by scaling headcount.
• Love recruiting and hiring awesome engineers.

What is clinical research and why will PicnicHealth win?

Clinical research is the industry that runs studies to evaluate how drugs & treatments work. It's hugely impactful — better trials mean faster, cheaper drug development, which means more and better treatments reaching patients. Unfortunately, the process is very inefficient. Trials are one of the biggest bottlenecks in drug development, and all the exciting advances in biotech won't translate into real impact if clinical research doesn't work better.

The industry runs on outdated technology and manual processes. Research sites (hospitals, academic centers, doctors' offices) are a major bottleneck, and contract research organizations (CROs) spend most of their time wrangling sites and cobbling together vendor software. 

PicnicHealth has built technology that uniquely positions us to run faster, cheaper, and more flexible studies without requiring sites:

• PicnicAI (trained on 350M+ clinician annotations over 100k+ patient records) is the only system that can effectively access and structure all participant EMR data trials need
• Our AI health assistant (NPS of 66 in 2024), which guides them through study activities and enables most to be done at home
• We're an integrated solution — virtual site, CRO, and software platform — with AI built in from the ground up, initially focusing on observational research.  

PicnicHealth at an exciting point, and this is a great opportunity

• Our business running observational studies more than doubled last year and we expect to grow even faster this year.  
• The eng team is already strong: ~20 engineers with great EMs, and a deeply technical AI team. 
• We've gained real traction in a conservative industry: 12 of the top 20 pharma companies use PicnicHealth, we've got 60+ publications across 40 disease areas, and we just had our first FDA approval that included our data in the submission.

PicnicHealth was founded in 2014, and has raised over $100 million from investors including YC, Amplify Partners, Felicis Ventures and B Capital Group. The VP Eng will report directly to our CEO. The team is distributed across the US, with the largest portion of ICs and execs in