Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.
Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.
The Role
We built a voice AI agent that talks to patients about their medical bills and it works. Kora is live with real clients and growing. Now we're expanding into chat, SMS, and outbound calls with a team of five engineers. This role is full-stack in the truest sense: you'll build data integrations, engineer LLM prompts, configure infrastructure, and ship features that real patients interact with the same week.
As a member of the Kora squad (formerly known as Support), your day might look like:
- Driving Innovation: Experimenting with and launching GenAI-powered features in collaboration with AI scientists.
- Harnessing Generative AI: Engineering development and production workflows by integrating LLMs, providing necessary context and constraints using modern practices, and evaluating output for further refinement. This includes context building, prompt design, and building evaluation pipelines that feed directly into Kora's live production system.
- Advancing Patient Understanding: Enhancing Kora, our first-in-class voice AI agent, to deliver personalized billing guidance via empathetic and compassionate communication. This means building the infrastructure that exposes insurance information, billing data, and third-party integrations to Kora and prompting the agent to utilize that data accurately in real-time patient conversations.
- Working Close to Our Users: Actively reviewing call transcripts and conversation logs to identify good and bad product behavior, then feeding those insights directly back into the system. This team runs unusually close to its end users that is part of how we move fast.
- Expanding Kora's Reach: Contributing to the transition from a primarily inbound voice-based agent to a multi-modal platform, including outbound calls, chat, and SMS. There are firsts still to be done on this roadmap.
- Inspiring and Leading Others: Actively contributing to team chartering, managing technical projects, and mentoring peer engineers to take ownership of their own projects.
- Raising the Technical Bar: Taking creative initiative, such as evaluating new approaches to agent-based engineering or developing rapid prototyping techniques. This includes working with the declarative AI agent platform the team uses to build Kora, and adapting quickly to a non-traditional codebase where prompting an LLM replaces hard-coded logic.
What We Look For
- Strong technical leadership with a track record of driving measurable impact across the stack (4–6 years of experience preferred, but not required).
- Experience in Generative AI and Large Language Models, either via use to increase productivity and efficiency, or by integrating APIs into a product. Personal or professional — we count both.
- Comfort crossing typical engineering boundaries. This role spans data pipeline and ETL work, third-party systems integration, cloud infrastructure setup (AWS or GCP), and product-facing feature development. We are not looking for a specialist, we are looking for someone who adapts to wherever the problem is.
- Demonstrated proficiency in independent, hands-on coding and problem-solving, including handling complex edge cases, optimising for efficiency, and delivering robust solutions within time constraints.
- Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to articulate complex technical ideas clearly, concisely, and with compelling examples, as well as asking insightful clarifying questions.
- A strong commitment to engineering best practices, including writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, and a proactive approach to managing technical debt.
- Entrepreneurial mindset; you thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and love solving complex problems.
- Experience with modern languages and frameworks; Python and TypeScript are the primary languages on this team (approximately 50/50). React experience is useful. We are polyglot-friendly, if you learn languages quickly, the specific stack matters less than the depth of what you have built.
- Comfort working with non-deterministic systems. LLM outputs vary; the same code can return different answers on different runs. This is a feature of the domain, not a bug. You will need to design for it, monitor for it, and iterate against it without the safety net of purely deterministic testing.
- Passion for our mission. You care about making healthcare simpler, fairer, and more transparent for patients.
Compensation Range and Benefits:
- Salary Range*: $170,000-215,000
- This role is equity eligible
- This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package
*Subject to location, experience, and education
What do we offer to the ideal candidate?
- A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
- Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
- For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
- 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
- Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians)
- Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
- Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
- Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally
About us
Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.