Staff Software Engineer
Develop Health · San Francisco
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 2.5 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
We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to turn complex healthcare problems into simple, reliable software. This is a hands-on role with ownership from understanding user needs through launch and production.
Together with Product, AI, and Operations, you'll build the systems that remove the obstacles between a prescription and treatment, from the interfaces people use to the services, integrations, and AI-powered workflows behind them.
You'll raise the bar for the engineering team through the technical decisions you make and the AI-native tools and practices you share.
What You'll Do - Impact In Your First 3–6 Months
Work with users to turn an ambiguous problem into the smallest useful solution and a clear measure of success.
Lead a complex product initiative from discovery through launch, defining the technical approach and milestones while personally building the critical parts.
Ship across backend services, user interfaces, data models, integrations, and workflow infrastructure.
Make architectural decisions across systems and explain the trade-offs clearly, so what we ship today still fits where the product is going.
Build testing, observability, safe rollouts, and AI fallbacks into the product, then iterate using production evidence and user feedback.
What You'll Own - Beyond 6 Months
Own the technical direction and customer outcomes of major product areas.
Solve technical problems that span products, and build shared services that make the next product faster to ship and run.
Shape the roadmap using customer evidence and operational data.
Build AI-native tools and engineering processes that help the whole team work with agents at every stage of development (planning, implementation, review, testing, and production).
What You'll Bring On Day One
Hands-on engineering. You have 5+ years of software engineering experience and can build, debug, and operate software across backend services, data, and user interfaces. You learn unfamiliar technologies quickly.
Architectural judgment. You can define clear system boundaries and weigh delivery speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability as products evolve.
Product sense. You work directly with users to figure out which problems are worth solving and what success looks like. You make complicated workflows easy for the people using them.
AI-native execution. You use coding agents to multiply your productivity and tackle more ambitious work, combining faster execution with the judgment and verification needed to ship reliable software.
Technical leadership. You've led complex projects hands-on, aligning collaborators and stakeholders around clear decisions. You make other engineers more effective by mentoring them and by building AI-native tools and processes that remove recurring blockers.
What You'll Need To Learn Quickly
How benefit verification and prior authorization work across providers, pharmacies, payers, and pharmacy benefit managers.
Where medication-access workflows break and how those failures affect patients, clinical teams, and operations.
How our product, workflow, and AI systems interact within healthcare data and reliability constraints.
How customers evaluate success across turnaround time, accuracy, approval outcomes, and operational effort.
Bonus Points
Experience building AI-powered or automation-heavy products in production.
Experience with healthcare, clinical workflows, EHRs, payers, pharmacies, or another regulated domain.
Early-stage startup experience or evidence that you thrive with high ownership and limited structure.
Experience building workflow products, data-heavy interfaces, or third-party integrations.
What We Offer
Competitive base salary plus meaningful early-stage equity.
Health, dental, and vision coverage; flexible PTO.
A high-end workstation and tooling budget, including the AI tools you want to use.
Direct ownership of products that improve access to medication.
If you want to build the software that gets patients their medications sooner, we'd love to hear from you.
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