Manager, Product Applied Science

Garner's mission is to transform the healthcare economy, delivering high-quality and affordable care for all.

We are fundamentally reimagining how healthcare works in the U.S. by partnering with employers to redesign healthcare benefits using clear incentives and powerful, data-driven insights. Our approach guides employees to higher-quality, lower-cost care, creating a system that works better for everyone. Patients achieve better health outcomes, employers spend healthcare dollars more effectively, and physicians are rewarded for delivering exceptional care rather than performing more procedures.

Garner is one of the fastest-growing healthcare technology companies in the country. Our products are trusted by the most sophisticated employers and providers in the industry, and we are building a team of talented, mission-driven individuals who are motivated to make a meaningful impact on healthcare at scale.

About the role:

We are seeking an exceptional Manager, Product Applied Science to build and lead a team at the core of Garner's product. Our members rely on us to answer hard questions — Which doctor should I see? What will it cost? When should we reach out, and how? — and the quality of those answers is determined by the algorithms behind them.

This is a hands-on management role. You are responsible for the overall technical direction of your squad, building alongside your team of Applied Scientists to solve some of the hardest problems at the company.

This is not a dashboards or descriptive-analytics team. Your team owns production systems end-to-end: framing the problem, defining the objective function, choosing the right approach (ML, optimization, heuristics, expert systems, or a hybrid), shipping it, and improving it against real-world outcomes. The closest analog outside healthcare is leading a research pod at a top hedge fund.

Where you will work:

This role will be based in our New York City office (in the Financial District). You must be willing to work in the office 3 days per week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

What you will do:

• Lead a team of 4-6 — hire, coach, and develop them, hold the bar on both rigor and speed, and help raise that bar across Applied Science
• Own the Population Health team and their outputs as a core responsibility 
• Own your team's roadmap and delivery: what gets built, in what order, and whether it ships
• Set technical direction, and get in the weeds to do it — stay close enough to the code and the data to call the approach yourself, whether that's machine learning, optimization, a heuristic, or a simple rule, and set the standard for how your team makes that call
• Define the set of metrics needed to judge whether a solution is working, and validate solutions before they ship
• Put your own hands on the problems where your judgment matters most — the highest-stakes, least-defined work — and deliver the algorithmic step-changes that move metrics like total-cost-of-care savings, steerage, and member engagement
• Turn ambiguous business goals into a clear problem set alongside Research, Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders, and represent your team's work to senior leadership
• Set the quality bar: review your team's work with rigor, and define the metrics that decide whether a solution is working
• Build a deep understanding of the healthcare economy and Garner's place in it
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To make the role concrete, here are three problems on our near-term roadmap:

• Provider tiering optimization. Build a tiering algorithm that jointly optimizes geographic access and total-cost-of-care savings across our doctor network. The objective function, constraints, and tradeoff surface are all open design questions.
• AI primary care doctor. Fine-tune and productionize an LLM-based primary care experience on our website, including the evaluation harness, guardrails, and ongoing quality monitoring needed to ship a medical-adjacent product safely.
• Member engagement model. Build an ML system that ingests claims data and in-app behavior to choose the right channel and moment for each touchpoint — SMS, push, phone, or email — to influence member behavior toward better-quality, lower-cost care.

The ideal candidate has:

• 6+ years of industry experience as an Applied Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Research Scientist, or equivalent; or 4+ years of industry experience with a relevant advanced degree, PhDs preferred
• Deep technical credibility, with the range and judgment to lead scientists who are experts in their own right, and the willingness to stay hands-on
• Strong judgment in choosing between statistical models, heuristics, optimization approaches, and simpler algorithmic methods depending on the problem
• Strong applied problem-solving skills, with the ability to define good metrics and then deliver solutions that improve them
• A bias toward action, quickly translating ideas into working prototypes to test approaches
• Strong communication skills, including at the executive level, with a track record of driving alignment across teams and functions
• A desire to be a part of a high-performing, mission-driven team that operates with urgency, a strong sense of individual accountability, and a commitment to authentic feedback

Technologies we use:

• Python, SQL, AWS, Snowflake, pandas, XGBoost, PyTorch, HuggingFace, modern LLM tooling and eval frameworks. We pick tools based on the problem, not the resume — bring your judgment.

This is a unique opportunity to build and lead the team behind Garner's algorithmic systems — shaping how members find better care, and how applied science gets done at Garner, while staying close to the work yourself.

What you'll get here:

You’ll work on problems that matter, at a company working to change healthcare at scale. You’ll work at the intersection of AI and systemic healthcare reform, where the problems we solve are as interesting and compelling as the mission.

At Garner, you’ll take on real, ambitious problems with real ownership and autonomy, alongside exceptional, principles-based people who genuinely want you to win. It’s demanding by design. You’ll be challenged to stretch beyond what you thought possible and receive consistent coaching to help you grow and do the best work of your career. This isn't the right fit for everyone, and that's intentional. The people here are driven by what's at stake for real people, and that's what gives our intensity its purpose. 

Compensation Transparency:

The target base comp range for this position is $300,000-$390,000. Individual compensation for this role will depend on various factors, including qualifications, skills, and applicable laws. In addition to base compensation, this role is eligible to participate in our equity incentive and competitive benefits plans, including but not limited to: flexible PTO, Medical/Dental/Vision plan options, 401(k) with company match, flexible spending accounts, Teladoc Health and more.