We're building an agentic AI caregiver advocate that lives in your text messages and acts on behalf of rare disease patients and their families. It doesn't just answer questions. It makes phone calls to insurance companies, automates browser sessions to find clinical trials, prepares patients for specialist appointments using their complete medical history, navigates government benefits applications, and coordinates across multiple sub-agents to get things done. It maintains persistent memory across months of interactions and gets smarter about each patient's condition, care team, and needs over time.
The AI engineering challenge: build an autonomous agent that operates reliably in one of the highest-stakes domains imaginable — where a wrong answer about a medication interaction or a missed insurance deadline has real consequences for a sick child and their family. Traditional chatbot architecture doesn't cut it. We need engineers who can design agentic systems that reason, plan, use tools, and know when to escalate to a human.
We're hiring AI Engineers to build the intelligence behind our AI advocate. You'll design and implement the agentic LLM systems, RAG pipelines, tool-use frameworks, and evaluation infrastructure that make it effective, reliable, and safe. This is not a research role — you'll ship production systems that real patients depend on daily.
You'll work closely with Product, Platform Engineering, and clinical advisors. You'll report to the CTO.
Agentic orchestration — Design and implement the multi-agent architecture that powers our advocate's ability to reason, plan, and execute complex multi-step tasks (scheduling appointments, filing insurance appeals, researching treatment options) with appropriate guardrails and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
RAG and medical knowledge systems — Build retrieval pipelines over patient medical records, condition-specific knowledge bases, and community-sourced data from 125+ rare disease communities. Ensure the advocate's responses are grounded in the patient's actual medical history, not generic information.
Tool-use and integrations — Build and maintain the frameworks that let our agent take real-world actions: browser automation, phone calls, form filling, document generation, and API integrations with healthcare systems. Each tool-use needs to be reliable, auditable, and scoped to the right permissions.
Conversation intelligence — Design the systems that make the advocate's WhatsApp conversations feel natural, contextual, and proactive. This includes long-term memory, conversation state management, personalization, and knowing when to surface information the patient didn't ask for but needs.
Evaluation and safety — Build evaluation frameworks for agentic outputs in a domain where \"good enough\" isn't good enough. Develop testing infrastructure for multi-step agent workflows, hallucination detection, medical accuracy validation, and regression testing across model updates.
Prompt engineering and model optimization — Design prompt architectures that balance capability, cost, and latency. Evaluate and integrate new models as the landscape evolves. Optimize inference costs — our unit economics depend on it.
You've built LLM-powered systems that went to production and had real users — not just demos and prototypes. You understand that the hard part of agentic AI isn't getting a cool demo working, it's making it reliable at the 95th percentile. You've dealt with the unglamorous parts: evaluation frameworks, prompt regression testing, cost optimization, and edge cases that only show up at scale.
You care about the craft of building AI systems, not just the hype cycle. You've formed opinions about when to use agents vs. chains vs. simple prompts, and you can articulate the tradeoffs. You're comfortable working in a startup where the stack is evolving fast and the best architecture for next quarter might not be the one you built last quarter.
4+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years building LLM-powered applications in production.
Strong proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or equivalent).
Experience designing and implementing RAG systems — including chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, retrieval evaluation, and hybrid search.
Track record building AI systems that take real-world actions (tool-use, function calling, browser automation, API orchestration), not just generate text.
Strong software engineering fundamentals — you write production-grade code with tests, logging, error handling, and clear abstractions. You're an engineer who uses AI, not a prompt writer who avoids code.
Experience with evaluation and testing of LLM systems — you've built evals, measured hallucination rates, and designed regression suites for non-deterministic outputs.
Comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration. You've worked at a startup or early-stage company and thrived.
Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain agentic architecture tradeoffs to a PM and debug a prompt chain with an engineer in the same afternoon.
Experience with healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated domains where AI output accuracy has high stakes (HIPAA compliance, clinical data handling).
Familiarity with multi-agent architectures — designing systems where multiple specialized agents collaborate, hand off tasks, and share context.
Experience with WhatsApp Business API, messaging platforms, or conversational AI at scale.
Background in inference cost optimization — model selection, caching, batching, routing between models of different capability/cost profiles.
Familiarity with medical data formats (FHIR, HL7, CDA) or experience building systems over medical records.
Experience with voice AI, telephony APIs, or browser automation frameworks (Playwright, Puppeteer).
Contributions to open-source AI/LLM tooling or active engagement with the agentic AI community.
Citizen Health was founded on the belief — shaped by firsthand lived experiences navigating healthcare — that having the right advocate is the single most important factor in achieving better care and outcomes. By uniquely combining data, AI, and community, Citizen is building a personalized AI advocate powered by patients' complete medical histories and data from thousands of other patients to generate personalized insights for clinical decisions and day-to-day challenges. Starting in rare and complex conditions, patients share their data in exchange for value, enabling biopharma and researchers with seamless access to patients and regulatory-grade data, shaving years off drug development for much-needed treatments.
Citizen is founded by experienced entrepreneurs with multiple successes under their belts and is funded by top-tier investors including 8VC, Transformation Capital, and Headline Ventures, among others. We are a mission-driven team excited to be building the future of consumer healthcare.
Build an agentic AI system in production that actually helps people — not another chatbot, not a copilot for knowledge workers, but an autonomous advocate for families navigating rare diseases.
Work on problems at the frontier of agentic AI: multi-step planning in high-stakes domains, tool-use over messy real-world systems, long-term memory and personalization, evaluation of non-deterministic autonomous agents.
Ship to real users immediately. Our AI advocate is live and serving patients today. Your code will be in production within your first sprint.
A fast-paced, high-growth setting with expanding opportunities and clear paths for career progression.
A supportive culture of learning, experimentation, and innovation, where new ideas are encouraged and explored.
Competitive salary + equity
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
Unlimited PTO, including 12 weeks paid parental leave
Flexible remote-first work environment
Work-from-anywhere 30 days per year
Company offsites
Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: Citizen Health is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences. Everyone deserves an equal chance to contribute and grow here — regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.
Don't meet every qualification? No worries! We believe that passion, curiosity, and the right mindset are just as important as a checklist of skills. If you’re excited about what we’re building, we encourage you to apply.
","descriptionPlain":"THE PROBLEM\n\nWe're building an agentic AI caregiver advocate that lives in your text messages and acts on behalf of rare disease patients and their families. It doesn't just answer questions. It makes phone calls to insurance companies, automates browser sessions to find clinical trials, prepares patients for specialist appointments using their complete medical history, navigates government benefits applications, and coordinates across multiple sub-agents to get things done. It maintains persistent memory across months of interactions and gets smarter about each patient's condition, care team, and needs over time.\n\nThe AI engineering challenge: build an autonomous agent that operates reliably in one of the highest-stakes domains imaginable — where a wrong answer about a medication interaction or a missed insurance deadline has real consequences for a sick child and their family. Traditional chatbot architecture doesn't cut it. We need engineers who can design agentic systems that reason, plan, use tools, and know when to escalate to a human.\n\n\n\n\nTHE ROLE\n\nWe're hiring AI Engineers to build the intelligence behind our AI advocate. You'll design and implement the agentic LLM systems, RAG pipelines, tool-use frameworks, and evaluation infrastructure that make it effective, reliable, and safe. This is not a research role — you'll ship production systems that real patients depend on daily.\n\nYou'll work closely with Product, Platform Engineering, and clinical advisors. You'll report to the CTO.\n\n\n\n\nWHAT YOU'LL BUILD\n\nAgentic orchestration — Design and implement the multi-agent architecture that powers our advocate's ability to reason, plan, and execute complex multi-step tasks (scheduling appointments, filing insurance appeals, researching treatment options) with appropriate guardrails and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.\n\nRAG and medical knowledge systems — Build retrieval pipelines over patient medical records, condition-specific knowledge bases, and community-sourced data from 125+ rare disease communities. Ensure the advocate's responses are grounded in the patient's actual medical history, not generic information.\n\nTool-use and integrations — Build and maintain the frameworks that let our agent take real-world actions: browser automation, phone calls, form filling, document generation, and API integrations with healthcare systems. Each tool-use needs to be reliable, auditable, and scoped to the right permissions.\n\nConversation intelligence — Design the systems that make the advocate's WhatsApp conversations feel natural, contextual, and proactive. This includes long-term memory, conversation state management, personalization, and knowing when to surface information the patient didn't ask for but needs.\n\nEvaluation and safety — Build evaluation frameworks for agentic outputs in a domain where \"good enough\" isn't good enough. Develop testing infrastructure for multi-step agent workflows, hallucination detection, medical accuracy validation, and regression testing across model updates.\n\nPrompt engineering and model optimization — Design prompt architectures that balance capability, cost, and latency. Evaluate and integrate new models as the landscape evolves. Optimize inference costs — our unit economics depend on it.\n\n\n\n\nWHO YOU ARE\n\nYou've built LLM-powered systems that went to production and had real users — not just demos and prototypes. You understand that the hard part of agentic AI isn't getting a cool demo working, it's making it reliable at the 95th percentile. You've dealt with the unglamorous parts: evaluation frameworks, prompt regression testing, cost optimization, and edge cases that only show up at scale.\n\nYou care about the craft of building AI systems, not just the hype cycle. You've formed opinions about when to use agents vs. chains vs. simple prompts, and you can articulate the tradeoffs. You're comfortable working in a startup where the stack is evolving fast and the best architecture for next quarter might not be the one you built last quarter.\n\n\n\n\nMUST-HAVE SKILLS\n\n - 4+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years building LLM-powered applications in production.\n\n - Strong proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or equivalent).\n\n - Experience designing and implementing RAG systems — including chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, retrieval evaluation, and hybrid search.\n\n - Track record building AI systems that take real-world actions (tool-use, function calling, browser automation, API orchestration), not just generate text.\n\n - Strong software engineering fundamentals — you write production-grade code with tests, logging, error handling, and clear abstractions. You're an engineer who uses AI, not a prompt writer who avoids code.\n\n - Experience with evaluation and testing of LLM systems — you've built evals, measured hallucination rates, and designed regression suites for non-deterministic outputs.\n\n - Comfort with ambiguity and fast iteration. You've worked at a startup or early-stage company and thrived.\n\n - Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain agentic architecture tradeoffs to a PM and debug a prompt chain with an engineer in the same afternoon.\n \n \n\n\nPREFERRED SKILLS\n\n - Experience with healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated domains where AI output accuracy has high stakes (HIPAA compliance, clinical data handling).\n\n - Familiarity with multi-agent architectures — designing systems where multiple specialized agents collaborate, hand off tasks, and share context.\n\n - Experience with WhatsApp Business API, messaging platforms, or conversational AI at scale.\n\n - Background in inference cost optimization — model selection, caching, batching, routing between models of different capability/cost profiles.\n\n - Familiarity with medical data formats (FHIR, HL7, CDA) or experience building systems over medical records.\n\n - Experience with voice AI, telephony APIs, or browser automation frameworks (Playwright, Puppeteer).\n\n - Contributions to open-source AI/LLM tooling or active engagement with the agentic AI community.\n \n \n\n\nWHO WE ARE\n\nCitizen Health was founded on the belief — shaped by firsthand lived experiences navigating healthcare — that having the right advocate is the single most important factor in achieving better care and outcomes. By uniquely combining data, AI, and community, Citizen is building a personalized AI advocate powered by patients' complete medical histories and data from thousands of other patients to generate personalized insights for clinical decisions and day-to-day challenges. Starting in rare and complex conditions, patients share their data in exchange for value, enabling biopharma and researchers with seamless access to patients and regulatory-grade data, shaving years off drug development for much-needed treatments.\n\nCitizen is founded by experienced entrepreneurs with multiple successes under their belts and is funded by top-tier investors including 8VC, Transformation Capital, and Headline Ventures, among others. We are a mission-driven team excited to be building the future of consumer healthcare.\n\n\n\n\nWHY JOIN US\n\n - Build an agentic AI system in production that actually helps people — not another chatbot, not a copilot for knowledge workers, but an autonomous advocate for families navigating rare diseases.\n\n - Work on problems at the frontier of agentic AI: multi-step planning in high-stakes domains, tool-use over messy real-world systems, long-term memory and personalization, evaluation of non-deterministic autonomous agents.\n\n - Ship to real users immediately. Our AI advocate is live and serving patients today. Your code will be in production within your first sprint.\n\n - A fast-paced, high-growth setting with expanding opportunities and clear paths for career progression.\n\n - A supportive culture of learning, experimentation, and innovation, where new ideas are encouraged and explored.\n \n \n\n\nCOMPENSATION & BENEFITS\n\n - Competitive salary + equity\n\n - Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance\n\n - Unlimited PTO, including 12 weeks paid parental leave\n\n - Flexible remote-first work environment\n\n - Work-from-anywhere 30 days per year\n\n - Company offsites\n\n\n\nOur Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: Citizen Health is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences. Everyone deserves an equal chance to contribute and grow here — regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.\n\n\n\nDon't meet every qualification? No worries! We believe that passion, curiosity, and the right mindset are just as important as a checklist of skills. If you’re excited about what we’re building, we encourage you to apply.","compensation":{"compensationTierSummary":"$150K – $300K","scrapeableCompensationSalarySummary":"$150K - $300K","compensationTiers":[{"id":"0dfdc1bc-332c-45da-ab34-59e743f21cdc","tierSummary":"$150K – $300K","title":null,"additionalInformation":null,"components":[{"id":"7482d2d3-f9c1-40aa-b6c6-0de7b532dbd0","summary":"$150K – $300K","compensationType":"Salary","interval":"1 YEAR","currencyCode":"USD","minValue":150000,"maxValue":300000}]}],"summaryComponents":[{"compensationType":"Salary","interval":"1 YEAR","currencyCode":"USD","minValue":150000,"maxValue":300000}]}},{"id":"3611379c-668c-4a55-a6e9-b93fefb45c6c","title":"Staff Platform Engineer","department":"Engineering","team":"Engineering","employmentType":"FullTime","location":"San Francisco","shouldDisplayCompensationOnJobPostings":false,"secondaryLocations":[],"publishedAt":"2026-05-20T17:39:38.056+00:00","isListed":true,"isRemote":true,"workplaceType":"Hybrid","address":{"postalAddress":{"addressRegion":"California","addressCountry":"United States","addressLocality":"San Francisco"}},"jobUrl":"https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Citizen%20Health/3611379c-668c-4a55-a6e9-b93fefb45c6c","applyUrl":"https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Citizen%20Health/3611379c-668c-4a55-a6e9-b93fefb45c6c/application","descriptionHtml":"We run an agentic AI platform that acts as a personal advocate for rare disease patients. Our AI agent lives in your text messages, makes phone calls, automates browser sessions, maintains persistent memory across months of patient interactions, and coordinates multiple sub-agents to handle everything from appointment preparation to insurance navigation. The infrastructure challenge is unlike anything in traditional SaaS: long-running autonomous agent sessions with unpredictable compute patterns, real-time messaging at scale, tool-use pipelines that touch the open web on behalf of patients, and healthcare-grade compliance requirements across all of it.
We need someone to own this platform end-to-end.
We're hiring a Staff Platform Engineer to build and own the infrastructure that powers Citizen Health — the cloud platform, deployment systems, and reliability practices that let our teams ship AI-driven features safely at speed. You'll partner with teams across AI, web, mobile, and data engineering to keep our platform performant, secure, and compliant with healthcare standards (HIPAA, SOC 2, and adjacent frameworks).
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll write code, set the direction for platform engineering, and raise the bar for how the entire org runs in production. You will likely be the first dedicated infrastructure hire and will build the platform engineering function from the ground up — owning everything from Terraform to on-call until you grow the team.
You'll report to the Director of Engineering.
Platform & infrastructure strategy — Set the technical direction for our agentic platform. Design architectures that handle long-running AI agent sessions, real-time WhatsApp message delivery, and autonomous tool execution (browser, phone, API calls) — all within HIPAA boundaries. Make the right build-vs-buy calls and keep infrastructure cost-efficient as we scale from hundreds to tens of thousands of active patients.
Reliability & observability — Define SLOs, build the observability stack, drive incident response, and keep uptime boringly high. Make on-call sustainable. When something breaks at 2am, you fix it, write the post-mortem, and spend the next sprint making sure it never happens again — without being asked.
CI/CD & developer experience — Own the deployment pipeline end-to-end. Eliminate friction in the inner and outer loops so teams can ship to production dozens of times a day with confidence. Our AI engineers should be thinking about models and prompts, not fighting deploys.
Inference cost & capacity management — AI inference is our largest variable cost. Partner with AI engineering to optimize model serving, manage GPU and compute capacity, negotiate vendor contracts, and make sure our unit economics work as we scale.
Security & compliance — Partner with security and legal to maintain HIPAA, SOC 2, and related regulatory standards. Implement controls that protect patient data without slowing teams down. Secure the agent tool-use pipeline — when our AI agent opens a browser or makes a phone call on behalf of a patient, the blast radius has to be contained.
Cross-functional partnership — Work closely with Product, AI/ML, Data, and Security to translate platform needs into roadmap. Unblock teams and mentor engineers across the org.
You've been the person who saw a scaling wall six months before it became a crisis, made the case to rearchitect, and then did the work. You've led infrastructure through a meaningful inflection — 10x traffic growth, launch into a new channel, migration from monolith to services — and you can talk concretely about what broke, what you learned, and what you'd do differently.
You thrive in early-stage environments where the team is small, the scope is broad, and the best answer hasn't been written in a runbook yet. You default to data, automate the toil, and document what you learn. You've worked at a startup before (ideally sub-50 people) and you liked it.
8+ years of software / infrastructure engineering experience; 4+ years in a senior IC or technical leadership role on a Platform, SRE, or DevOps team.
Deep expertise running production systems on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Hands-on with Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), and modern CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Spinnaker, etc.).
Strong programming skills in at least one of Go, Python, or TypeScript — you build tooling, not just configure it.
Demonstrated experience scaling infrastructure through a significant growth inflection (10x users, new product surface, architectural migration) in a production environment.
Proven track record designing for high availability, zero-downtime releases, and graceful degradation in regulated or data-intensive environments.
Strong security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management, network segmentation, vulnerability management, supply-chain security.
Experience at an early-stage or high-growth startup where you owned infrastructure broadly, not just a narrow slice.
Excellent written and verbal communication — you're equally effective in a post-mortem, a roadmap discussion, and a Slack thread.
Experience supporting AI/ML workloads in production — model serving, inference optimization, GPU infrastructure, vector databases, or large-scale data pipelines. This is close to a must-have given our architecture.
Familiarity with agentic AI systems, multi-agent orchestration, or long-running autonomous workflows.
Experience with messaging infrastructure at scale — message queues, webhook reliability, delivery guarantees, rate limiting (WhatsApp, SMS, or similar).
Background in healthtech, life sciences, fintech, or other regulated domains (HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST, FedRAMP).
Familiarity with FHIR / HL7 or other healthcare data standards.
Experience growing a Platform or SRE function from a small group of generalists into a specialized team.
Citizen Health was founded on the belief — shaped by firsthand lived experiences navigating healthcare — that having the right advocate is the single most important factor in achieving better care and outcomes. By uniquely combining data, AI, and community, Citizen is building a personalized AI advocate powered by patients' complete medical histories and data from thousands of other patients to generate personalized insights for clinical decisions and day-to-day challenges. Starting in rare and complex conditions, patients share their data in exchange for value, enabling biopharma and researchers with seamless access to patients and regulatory-grade data, shaving years off drug development for much-needed treatments.
Citizen is founded by experienced entrepreneurs with multiple successes under their belts and is funded by top-tier investors including 8VC, Transformation Capital, and Headline Ventures, among others. We are a mission-driven team excited to be building the future of consumer healthcare.
The chance to build platform infrastructure for an agentic AI system that doesn't exist anywhere else — the playbook hasn't been written yet.
A real mission with real patients. The people using our product are navigating rare diseases with their children. The infrastructure you build directly affects whether they get the right diagnosis, the right benefits, the right clinical trial.
Ownership from day one. You'll shape the platform engineering function, not inherit someone else's architecture.
A fast-paced, high-growth setting with expanding opportunities and clear paths for career progression.
A supportive culture of learning, experimentation, and innovation, where new ideas are encouraged and explored.
Competitive salary + equity
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
Unlimited PTO, including 12 weeks paid parental leave
Flexible remote-first work environment
Work-from-anywhere 30 days per year
Company offsites
Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: Citizen Health is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences — regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.
Don't meet every qualification? We believe that passion, curiosity, and the right mindset matter as much as a checklist of skills. If you're excited about what we're building, we encourage you to apply.
","descriptionPlain":"THE PROBLEM\n\nWe run an agentic AI platform that acts as a personal advocate for rare disease patients. Our AI agent lives in your text messages, makes phone calls, automates browser sessions, maintains persistent memory across months of patient interactions, and coordinates multiple sub-agents to handle everything from appointment preparation to insurance navigation. The infrastructure challenge is unlike anything in traditional SaaS: long-running autonomous agent sessions with unpredictable compute patterns, real-time messaging at scale, tool-use pipelines that touch the open web on behalf of patients, and healthcare-grade compliance requirements across all of it.\n\nWe need someone to own this platform end-to-end.\n\n\n\n\nTHE ROLE\n\nWe're hiring a Staff Platform Engineer to build and own the infrastructure that powers Citizen Health — the cloud platform, deployment systems, and reliability practices that let our teams ship AI-driven features safely at speed. You'll partner with teams across AI, web, mobile, and data engineering to keep our platform performant, secure, and compliant with healthcare standards (HIPAA, SOC 2, and adjacent frameworks).\n\nThis is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll write code, set the direction for platform engineering, and raise the bar for how the entire org runs in production. You will likely be the first dedicated infrastructure hire and will build the platform engineering function from the ground up — owning everything from Terraform to on-call until you grow the team.\n\nYou'll report to the Director of Engineering.\n\n\n\n\nWHAT YOU'LL DRIVE\n\nPlatform & infrastructure strategy — Set the technical direction for our agentic platform. Design architectures that handle long-running AI agent sessions, real-time WhatsApp message delivery, and autonomous tool execution (browser, phone, API calls) — all within HIPAA boundaries. Make the right build-vs-buy calls and keep infrastructure cost-efficient as we scale from hundreds to tens of thousands of active patients.\n\nReliability & observability — Define SLOs, build the observability stack, drive incident response, and keep uptime boringly high. Make on-call sustainable. When something breaks at 2am, you fix it, write the post-mortem, and spend the next sprint making sure it never happens again — without being asked.\n\nCI/CD & developer experience — Own the deployment pipeline end-to-end. Eliminate friction in the inner and outer loops so teams can ship to production dozens of times a day with confidence. Our AI engineers should be thinking about models and prompts, not fighting deploys.\n\nInference cost & capacity management — AI inference is our largest variable cost. Partner with AI engineering to optimize model serving, manage GPU and compute capacity, negotiate vendor contracts, and make sure our unit economics work as we scale.\n\nSecurity & compliance — Partner with security and legal to maintain HIPAA, SOC 2, and related regulatory standards. Implement controls that protect patient data without slowing teams down. Secure the agent tool-use pipeline — when our AI agent opens a browser or makes a phone call on behalf of a patient, the blast radius has to be contained.\n\nCross-functional partnership — Work closely with Product, AI/ML, Data, and Security to translate platform needs into roadmap. Unblock teams and mentor engineers across the org.\n\n\n\n\nWHO YOU ARE\n\nYou've been the person who saw a scaling wall six months before it became a crisis, made the case to rearchitect, and then did the work. You've led infrastructure through a meaningful inflection — 10x traffic growth, launch into a new channel, migration from monolith to services — and you can talk concretely about what broke, what you learned, and what you'd do differently.\n\nYou thrive in early-stage environments where the team is small, the scope is broad, and the best answer hasn't been written in a runbook yet. You default to data, automate the toil, and document what you learn. You've worked at a startup before (ideally sub-50 people) and you liked it.\n\n\n\n\nMUST-HAVE SKILLS\n\n - 8+ years of software / infrastructure engineering experience; 4+ years in a senior IC or technical leadership role on a Platform, SRE, or DevOps team.\n\n - Deep expertise running production systems on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).\n\n - Hands-on with Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), and modern CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Spinnaker, etc.).\n\n - Strong programming skills in at least one of Go, Python, or TypeScript — you build tooling, not just configure it.\n\n - Demonstrated experience scaling infrastructure through a significant growth inflection (10x users, new product surface, architectural migration) in a production environment.\n\n - Proven track record designing for high availability, zero-downtime releases, and graceful degradation in regulated or data-intensive environments.\n\n - Strong security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management, network segmentation, vulnerability management, supply-chain security.\n\n - Experience at an early-stage or high-growth startup where you owned infrastructure broadly, not just a narrow slice.\n\n - Excellent written and verbal communication — you're equally effective in a post-mortem, a roadmap discussion, and a Slack thread.\n \n \n\n\nPREFERRED SKILLS\n\n - Experience supporting AI/ML workloads in production — model serving, inference optimization, GPU infrastructure, vector databases, or large-scale data pipelines. This is close to a must-have given our architecture.\n\n - Familiarity with agentic AI systems, multi-agent orchestration, or long-running autonomous workflows.\n\n - Experience with messaging infrastructure at scale — message queues, webhook reliability, delivery guarantees, rate limiting (WhatsApp, SMS, or similar).\n\n - Background in healthtech, life sciences, fintech, or other regulated domains (HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST, FedRAMP).\n\n - Familiarity with FHIR / HL7 or other healthcare data standards.\n\n - Experience growing a Platform or SRE function from a small group of generalists into a specialized team.\n \n \n\n\nWHO WE ARE\n\nCitizen Health was founded on the belief — shaped by firsthand lived experiences navigating healthcare — that having the right advocate is the single most important factor in achieving better care and outcomes. By uniquely combining data, AI, and community, Citizen is building a personalized AI advocate powered by patients' complete medical histories and data from thousands of other patients to generate personalized insights for clinical decisions and day-to-day challenges. Starting in rare and complex conditions, patients share their data in exchange for value, enabling biopharma and researchers with seamless access to patients and regulatory-grade data, shaving years off drug development for much-needed treatments.\n\nCitizen is founded by experienced entrepreneurs with multiple successes under their belts and is funded by top-tier investors including 8VC, Transformation Capital, and Headline Ventures, among others. We are a mission-driven team excited to be building the future of consumer healthcare.\n\n\n\n\nWHY JOIN US\n\n - The chance to build platform infrastructure for an agentic AI system that doesn't exist anywhere else — the playbook hasn't been written yet.\n\n - A real mission with real patients. The people using our product are navigating rare diseases with their children. The infrastructure you build directly affects whether they get the right diagnosis, the right benefits, the right clinical trial.\n\n - Ownership from day one. You'll shape the platform engineering function, not inherit someone else's architecture.\n\n - A fast-paced, high-growth setting with expanding opportunities and clear paths for career progression.\n\n - A supportive culture of learning, experimentation, and innovation, where new ideas are encouraged and explored.\n \n \n\n\nCOMPENSATION & BENEFITS\n\n - Competitive salary + equity\n\n - Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance\n\n - Unlimited PTO, including 12 weeks paid parental leave\n\n - Flexible remote-first work environment\n\n - Work-from-anywhere 30 days per year\n\n - Company offsites\n \n \n\nOur Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: Citizen Health is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences — regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.\n\nDon't meet every qualification? We believe that passion, curiosity, and the right mindset matter as much as a checklist of skills. If you're excited about what we're building, we encourage you to apply.","compensation":{"compensationTierSummary":null,"scrapeableCompensationSalarySummary":null,"compensationTiers":[],"summaryComponents":[]}},{"id":"d90f69ef-1bf3-4bb1-a136-3769b82ca0ce","title":"Research Partnerships Manager","department":"Clinical Strategy","team":"Clinical Strategy","employmentType":"FullTime","location":"San Francisco","shouldDisplayCompensationOnJobPostings":true,"secondaryLocations":[],"publishedAt":"2026-08-24T13:15:57.672+00:00","isListed":true,"isRemote":true,"workplaceType":"Hybrid","address":{"postalAddress":{"addressRegion":"California","addressCountry":"United States","addressLocality":"San Francisco"}},"jobUrl":"https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Citizen%20Health/d90f69ef-1bf3-4bb1-a136-3769b82ca0ce","applyUrl":"https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Citizen%20Health/d90f69ef-1bf3-4bb1-a136-3769b82ca0ce/application","descriptionHtml":"At Citizen Health, we have a singular mission: to improve the lives of the 350 million+ people living with rare and complex conditions. We empower patients with seamless access and control over their health data that they can share across our multi-sided platform with caregivers, providers and researchers to illuminate better treatment and support options, while bringing therapies to patients faster. We support thousands of patients, work with a rapidly growing network of patient advocacy organizations, and innovate with leading biopharma organizations to accelerate therapies, always ensuring patients remain at the center.
We are a team of patients, caregivers, researchers and builders who have had first-hand experience across the spectrum of rare disease. Led by a seasoned founding team with a history of successful exits in healthcare and consumer startups, and supported by top-tier investors, we are a close-knit, mission-driven group seeking exceptional talents to join us.
As a Research Partnerships Manager, you will be the connective tissue between Citizen Health, our research partners, and our internal science, product, and commercial teams. You'll serve as the primary point of contact for a key strategic research partnership, own the operational build and quality of the surveys and technical documentation that power our studies, and quarterback study kick-offs so that scope, requirements, and expectations stay aligned from the first conversation through launch.
This role is for someone who is exceptionally organized, fluent enough in research and data to navigate technical documentation and ask the right questions, and energized by keeping complex, multi-stakeholder work moving. You won't be designing studies or writing analysis code — but you will be the person who makes sure the right experts are in the room, the requirements are captured precisely, and nothing falls through the cracks between what we agree to and what we deliver.
Partnership Management & Point of Contact
Serve as the day-to-day point of contact for a strategic research partnership, building trusted, productive working relationships with partner counterparts
Lead regular partner meetings; manage communications, agendas, and follow-through on action items and shared deliverables
Field incoming partner and client questions, resolving what you can and triaging the rest to the right internal experts
Survey Development, Documentation & QA
Navigate, interpret, and help refine data dictionaries shared by our research partners
Build surveys in our internal survey-building tool, translating requirements and logic into a working, accurate instrument
Perform quality assurance on built surveys to ensure they flow as intended, that branching logic behaves correctly, and that the experience performs reliably for end users
Act as steward of the data-dictionary \"contract\" between partners and Citizen, keeping specifications tight and well-communicated to prevent scope drift between what is agreed and what is delivered
Data Requests & Delivery Coordination
Serve as the intake point for data requests from patient advocacy groups (PAGs) and nonprofit researchers, managing each request from submission through fulfillment
Coordinate timely, accurate delivery of data to PAGs once a request is confirmed to be in scope
You are a highly organized operator who thrives on coordination and keeping many threads aligned toward a shared goal. You're comfortable with structured data and technical documentation, and you're curious enough about research to ask good questions and know when to bring in an expert. You build trust easily with both scientists and external partners, you're proactive about risk, and you can lead without formal authority. You love the pace and ambiguity of a startup and you take pride in tight documentation and clean handoffs.
Required
Bachelor's degree in a life science, public health, social science, or related field
3+ years of experience in program or project management, research coordination, clinical operations, or a similar role, ideally in healthcare, health tech, life sciences, or a research setting
Familiarity with research methods and study concepts sufficient to navigate technical documentation and triage research and data questions appropriately
Comfort working with structured data specifications (e.g., data dictionaries) and building or configuring surveys in a no-code/low-code tool (e.g., Typeform, Qualtrics, REDCap, or similar)
Demonstrated ability to manage multiple concurrent projects and external partners, leading through cross-functional collaboration without formal authority
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with strong attention to detail and documentation rigor
Comfortable working autonomously in a fast-paced startup environment
Preferred
Experience in rare disease, patient registries, natural history studies, or patient-reported outcomes
Prior experience serving as a client- or partner-facing point of contact
Familiarity with survey methodology, branching/skip logic, and survey QA / user acceptance testing
Familiarity with clinical or health data standards
Ownership: You'll have a seat at the table and your voice will shape the company.
Growth: We're scaling fast, and so will your responsibilities and opportunities.
Culture: Transparent, inclusive, and genuinely fun.
Competitive salary + equity
Health, dental, and vision insurance
Unlimited PTO
If you don't meet every single requirement but you're passionate about what we're building, we still encourage you to apply. Nobody checks all the boxes, and at Citizen Health, we believe the right candidate is much more than a list of qualifications on a resume.
At Citizen Health, we're committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We provide equal opportunities regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.
","descriptionPlain":"WHO WE ARE\n\nAt Citizen Health, we have a singular mission: to improve the lives of the 350 million+ people living with rare and complex conditions. We empower patients with seamless access and control over their health data that they can share across our multi-sided platform with caregivers, providers and researchers to illuminate better treatment and support options, while bringing therapies to patients faster. We support thousands of patients, work with a rapidly growing network of patient advocacy organizations, and innovate with leading biopharma organizations to accelerate therapies, always ensuring patients remain at the center.\n\nWe are a team of patients, caregivers, researchers and builders who have had first-hand experience across the spectrum of rare disease. Led by a seasoned founding team with a history of successful exits in healthcare and consumer startups, and supported by top-tier investors, we are a close-knit, mission-driven group seeking exceptional talents to join us.\n\n\nTHE ROLE\n\nAs a Research Partnerships Manager, you will be the connective tissue between Citizen Health, our research partners, and our internal science, product, and commercial teams. You'll serve as the primary point of contact for a key strategic research partnership, own the operational build and quality of the surveys and technical documentation that power our studies, and quarterback study kick-offs so that scope, requirements, and expectations stay aligned from the first conversation through launch.\n\nThis role is for someone who is exceptionally organized, fluent enough in research and data to navigate technical documentation and ask the right questions, and energized by keeping complex, multi-stakeholder work moving. You won't be designing studies or writing analysis code — but you will be the person who makes sure the right experts are in the room, the requirements are captured precisely, and nothing falls through the cracks between what we agree to and what we deliver.\n\n\nRESPONSIBILITIES\n\nPartnership Management & Point of Contact\n\n - Serve as the day-to-day point of contact for a strategic research partnership, building trusted, productive working relationships with partner counterparts\n\n - Lead regular partner meetings; manage communications, agendas, and follow-through on action items and shared deliverables\n\n - Field incoming partner and client questions, resolving what you can and triaging the rest to the right internal experts\n\nSurvey Development, Documentation & QA\n\n - Navigate, interpret, and help refine data dictionaries shared by our research partners\n\n - Build surveys in our internal survey-building tool, translating requirements and logic into a working, accurate instrument\n\n - Perform quality assurance on built surveys to ensure they flow as intended, that branching logic behaves correctly, and that the experience performs reliably for end users\n\n - Act as steward of the data-dictionary \"contract\" between partners and Citizen, keeping specifications tight and well-communicated to prevent scope drift between what is agreed and what is delivered\n\nData Requests & Delivery Coordination\n\n - Serve as the intake point for data requests from patient advocacy groups (PAGs) and nonprofit researchers, managing each request from submission through fulfillment\n\n - Coordinate timely, accurate delivery of data to PAGs once a request is confirmed to be in scope\n\n\nWHO YOU ARE\n\nYou are a highly organized operator who thrives on coordination and keeping many threads aligned toward a shared goal. You're comfortable with structured data and technical documentation, and you're curious enough about research to ask good questions and know when to bring in an expert. You build trust easily with both scientists and external partners, you're proactive about risk, and you can lead without formal authority. You love the pace and ambiguity of a startup and you take pride in tight documentation and clean handoffs.\n\n\nQUALIFICATIONS\n\nRequired\n\n - Bachelor's degree in a life science, public health, social science, or related field\n\n - 3+ years of experience in program or project management, research coordination, clinical operations, or a similar role, ideally in healthcare, health tech, life sciences, or a research setting\n\n - Familiarity with research methods and study concepts sufficient to navigate technical documentation and triage research and data questions appropriately\n\n - Comfort working with structured data specifications (e.g., data dictionaries) and building or configuring surveys in a no-code/low-code tool (e.g., Typeform, Qualtrics, REDCap, or similar)\n\n - Demonstrated ability to manage multiple concurrent projects and external partners, leading through cross-functional collaboration without formal authority\n\n - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with strong attention to detail and documentation rigor\n\n - Comfortable working autonomously in a fast-paced startup environment\n\nPreferred\n\n - Experience in rare disease, patient registries, natural history studies, or patient-reported outcomes\n\n - Prior experience serving as a client- or partner-facing point of contact\n\n - Familiarity with survey methodology, branching/skip logic, and survey QA / user acceptance testing\n\n - Familiarity with clinical or health data standards\n\n\nBENEFITS\n\n - Ownership: You'll have a seat at the table and your voice will shape the company.\n\n - Growth: We're scaling fast, and so will your responsibilities and opportunities.\n\n - Culture: Transparent, inclusive, and genuinely fun.\n\n - Competitive salary + equity\n\n - Health, dental, and vision insurance\n\n - Unlimited PTO\n\nIf you don't meet every single requirement but you're passionate about what we're building, we still encourage you to apply. Nobody checks all the boxes, and at Citizen Health, we believe the right candidate is much more than a list of qualifications on a resume.\n\nAt Citizen Health, we're committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We provide equal opportunities regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.","compensation":{"compensationTierSummary":"$90K – $110K • Offers Equity","scrapeableCompensationSalarySummary":"$90K - $110K","compensationTiers":[{"id":"da138d29-054b-4da4-817b-b817476468a9","tierSummary":"$90K – $110K • Offers Equity","title":null,"additionalInformation":null,"components":[{"id":"2243917e-d7da-4831-ad64-5dfc97a6f19c","summary":"$90K – $110K","compensationType":"Salary","interval":"1 YEAR","currencyCode":"USD","minValue":90000,"maxValue":110000},{"id":"ebab500d-67e5-4d1d-8d8f-81c6fa44f2ed","summary":"Offers Equity","compensationType":"EquityPercentage","interval":"NONE","currencyCode":null,"minValue":null,"maxValue":null}]}],"summaryComponents":[{"compensationType":"Salary","interval":"1 YEAR","currencyCode":"USD","minValue":90000,"maxValue":110000},{"compensationType":"EquityPercentage","interval":"NONE","currencyCode":null,"minValue":null,"maxValue":null}]}}],"apiVersion":"1"}