Head of Engineering

Develop Health is on a mission to use AI to radically accelerate access to life-saving medications. By automating complex, manual healthcare processes—like benefit verification and prior authorization— we've been growing rapidly and over the past couple of years have helped over 3.6 million patients!

We’re partnering with some of the largest pharmacy benefit managers and payers in the nation, revolutionizing how healthcare interactions occur by eliminating human delays and inefficiencies. Our small, elite team of founders and engineers have previously launched and exited successful healthcare startups including Rupa Health and Canvas Medical. We are now scaling rapidly following a major funding round.

About The Role

As Head of Engineering, you will lead the teams building the technology and workflows that enable us to solve the prior authorization bottleneck challenging prescribers, pharmacies, and pharma - and most importantly, the patients who need medication. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will run day-to-day engineering execution, grow and develop engineers and tech leads, and stay close enough to the code to make the hard architectural calls. You’ll also be regularly involved, alongside our tech leads, in sales calls with customers, wearing a product and solutions-engineering hat that keeps the voice of the customer close to our build.

Our platform and agents work in healthcare delivery, meaning our workflows must be accurate and highly reliable, and with documentation digestible to our non-technical customers: pharmaceutical companies, pharmacists, and doctors prescribing medication. In this field we must ship fast without compromising the accuracy, security, and reliability that healthcare delivery demands. You will report to the co-founder and CTO, and sit on and partner closely with our extended leadership team.

This is a hybrid role, with 3 days per week onsite in either Menlo Park or San Francisco.

What You’ll Do

• Own delivery: Run engineering execution across multiple pods, with weekly ship cycles, clear ownership, and a culture where velocity and high reliability go hand-in-hand.

• Build and lead the team: Hire, onboard, and develop senior engineers to recent grads, growing your tech lead and engineering manager layer as we scale. (Current team is 2 leads and 7 engineers) You will be highly involved in growing the team your first six months, and as we scale, we expect you’ll interview each person at onsite to keep the bar high.

• Ship enterprise-grade technology: Our customers are used to and expect enterprise-grade quality that seamlessly works with existing systems and EHRs, within their existing workflows. You’ll guide the architecture of our platform and systems so they are accurate, explainable, and extensible as we scale and move into new workflows, integrations, and verticals.

• Raise quality and reliability: Establish practical standards for code review, testing, agent and AI evaluations, observability, on-call, and incident response.

• Compliance and Security: Partner with our infrastructure lead and fractional CISO to meet the security, privacy, and deployment requirements of our customers.

• Connect engineering to the customer: Work with product and our GTM leaders to turn customer feedback and requirements into roadmaps and built features.

About You

• You are a hands-on leader: You are a strong engineer who can read a PR, spot an architectural mistake, and fix it yourself when that’s expedient. You also know the team scale with the company, and know how to coach and teach earlier-in-career engineers how to develop their craft as engineers, including their instincts, judgement and taste that can’t be developed by AI, and often are eroded by it.

• You have become AI-native: You have shipped LLM, agentic, or ML systems to production and understand evaluation, context management, and the difference between a demo and a production system. You manage AI with judgement and taste, and hold a high technical bar for elegance, quality, and extensibility.

• You bring scaling experience: You have grown engineering teams as a company scales, and developed engineers into tech leads and managers over time.

• You operate with velocity, and discernment: References say you move fast, but you know when to slow down 10% to check your thinking, the requirements, and what problem we’re trying to solve. You reduce work-about-work, but insert good-friction when needed to maintain quality and reliability.

• You value reliability and compliance: You have built in a domain where getting it right matters, such as security, compliance, fintech, or health.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years managing engineers and 2+ years growing managers or tech leads.

• Hands-on experience shipping enterprise-grade systems in an AI-native way.

• Demonstrated experience hiring and scaling engineering teams at a high-growth company.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to represent engineering with customers and fellow leaders alike.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary plus meaningful early-stage equity.

• A direct line to the CEO and real ownership of a business outcome.

• Work that directly accelerates access to medication for hundreds of thousands of patients, with room to grow as the function scales.