Tech Lead

Who We Are A few weeks ago a 95-year-old patient called one of our practices. She apologized for being long-winded before she’d said much of anything. “I promise my mind is still very sharp,” she said; you could hear in her voice that she’d been made to feel otherwise. Our agent didn’t cut her off. It listened. She thanked it at the end of the call for being so patient. She probably didn’t know she was talking to AI. But she felt that someone had listened. Most voice agent companies in healthcare are racing to solve one thing: getting patients off hold fast enough to schedule an appointment. We think that’s the wrong finish line. The moment a patient calls is just the beginning: there’s the referral fax, the insurance check, the prescription refill, the follow-up, the billing. Most of it is invisible to the patient and exhausting for the practice. We’re building the platform that handles all of it, with the patient at the center of every touchpoint. Parakeet Health is a voice first, AI-native patient communication platform helping medical practices deliver greater access to healthcare for their patients — improving patients lives while increasing efficiency for practices. Healthcare is broken. We’re building the healthcare experience we all want and expect. We’re 2 years in and working with 400+ medical practices across 27 specialities, including primary care, dermatology, optometry, and mental health. One Medical's founder is an investor. We've raised over $13M in VC funding and grew ARR 10x last year, which means it's a great time to join. The Role Honest take : We’ve invested heavily in internal LLM harnesses and tools to empower our engineers to scale our product far beyond what any sane observer would think our team size should handle. What won’t scale with LLMs is the the hands-on mentorship, leadership, and focus on raising the bar for a rapidly growing engineering org. We’re looking for a player-coach to not only contribute to core technical decisions, but also to continue pushing the bar when it comes to craft, attention to detail, and process beyond lines of code. You’ll be an engineering leader first - emphasis on “engineering.” Making key technical decisions, shipping platform + customer code, and driving ML experimentation will always be part of the role. Your job, more broadly, is to help lead our two engineering pods (Platform and FDE) - focusing on leading by example with the IC work you do, and being a resource for both technical and career mentorship. You’ll focus on investing in our people, especially as the team grows. You’ll be a guiding voice in team meetings, sprint + roadmap planning, and 1:1s will be critical as the org scales. For the next 6 months, your role will be 70% IC work and 30% technical leadership. As you settle into the role, the goal is to invert that distribution to 70% leadership and 30% IC work. You’re a fit if you want to go into engineering management in the next 12-18 months - as we rapidly scale, that is the trajectory of this role. What Technical Systems You’d Own Specific parts of our product you’ll own and continue to push quality on: Voice and conversation design at scale . Our agents speak to tens of thousands of patients daily - under the hood our platform is an audio streaming service at scale. Between infra and the core agent platform, there are endless challenges that arise in production. The gap between “technically correct” and “actually human” is enormous, and it’s not a problem you can prompt your way out of. Building the infrastructure that makes all of this possible . Getting an agent to fix a bug autonomously sounds simple. Getting it to do that reliably, on a production codebase that handles real patient data, is a different problem. It requires evaluation systems that can tell the difference between a good fix and a confident wrong answer, context that’s rich enough for the agent to understand what it’s touching, and guardrails that fail safely when it doesn’t. We’ve built a lot of this. There’s more to build. And the honest truth is that the agents are only as trustworthy as the humans who designed the systems around them. Who Thrives at Parakeet Health You question things . This is the single most important quality we’re looking for - you genuinely don’t accept the status quo when you can see a better way, and you want to empower others to constantly be better. You’re the counterbalance to people who defer too quickly, and you make the team better for it. You care about the people you work with and genuinely want to see them succeed even outside of the company’s trajectory. You treat LLMs as force multipliers and you’re already working that way. You have taste . It’s the thing that’s hardest to hire for and most important to get right. It means you can tell the difference between code that’s technically correct and a patient experience that’s genuinely good. You notice the thing that’s slightly wrong and then you can’t unknow it (and you won’t ship until it’s right). You understand that what we’re building is a science and an art, and you take both seriously. You care about shipping things that reach real people , not abstract users. That context should inform how you think about every decision you make here. If it doesn’t, this probably won’t be the right fit. You’re honest about what you don’t know . “You might have a point; I may be wrong” should be something you’ve said recently and meant. We debate, we disagree, we challenge each other, but we do it with respect and with the assumption of good intent. Someone who can’t say they’re wrong won’t last long here, and frankly won’t enjoy it much either. You know there’s unglamorous work and you don’t think it’s beneath you . No matter your seniority, everyone rotates through the mundane stuff. That’s just how it works at this stage, and the people who are great here are the ones who do it without making it a thing. You shouldn’t apply if: You’re drawn to heavy ML research . That’s not what this is, and it would probably frustrate you. We’re building products that leverage models, not the models themselves, and a generalist engineer with strong instincts and genuine curiosity will outperform an ML specialist here almost every time. You want someone to define the problem in detail before you start . We’re moving too fast for that, and the most interesting problems here are the ones nobody has fully defined yet. You need a detailed roadmap three years out . We shoot for a north star but we’re constantly adapting. Agility is our advantage. The Team Our honest assessment: this team skews high EQ. (Maybe too high. We probably need more shoelace staring.) But it’s also what makes working here feel different from most engineering environments: people genuinely like each other, go climbing together, form bands, bake for each other. The culture isn’t declared. It’s just what happens when you hire people you actually want to spend time with. Cecilia (FDE) has been here the longest and is, by general consensus, the heartbeat of the culture. She has a cat named Kiwi (she’s allergic to cats, so this is real commitment) and strong opinions about where to eat lunch. Arnav (FDE) has a passion for all things agentic - whether it’s for customer-facing workflows or internal testing harnesses. From day one, he’s been making his agents drive higher resolution rates, and delighting customers in the process. He’s also a demon in pickup basketball. James owns the OCR service, nearly by himself. What is a multi-billion dollar company pre-LLMs is now a one-man army at Parakeet Health. Also loves soccer, gaming, and vlogging about the best Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area. Emen is a very senior, experienced engineering lead with an emphasis on all things quality and evals. Bugs fear him. He’s also raising a (hopefully) future Olympic speedskater and reads statistics textbooks in his free time. He’s currently in a rabbit hole about probabilistic testing. Tarin (FDE) was going down the lawyer track then hard pivoted into software engineering. Loves giving customers all her attention and has a passion for Korean food and LA sports. Max (FDE) loves building for customers - specifically drawing on his experience shipping for the convoluted workflows of the eye care space. Also makes a life-changing hand-made Orecchiette and cooks for the team! Barrett (FDE) hails from the Pacific Northwest - he loves driving everything customer and agentic platform, and he’ll talk your ear off about college sports. Sumedh joined because he’d been watching what we were building and couldn’t stay on the sidelines. He’s senior enough to mentor everyone, but humble enough that nobody feels mentored. Also inexplicably West Coast for an East Coast guy. Tyrone commutes from Berkeley by bike every day, which is either impressive or unhinged depending on how you feel about the Bay Bridge. He loves climbing and will invite every new hire to go with him. Mimu has already built a Claude onboarding agent that turns customer docs and meeting transcripts into a configured agent, shrinking implementation time from 5 days to 2 hours. In his spare time he’s building a 3D printed clock. (The clock was not on anyone’s roadmap.) Tom leads Customer Success and is technical enough to do real triage before anything reaches you, which means the problems that land on your desk are actually worth solving. He also has a dachshund named Wanda who is, by any measurable metric, our most effective marketing asset. Massimo talks to Claude Code just as much as he does to customers. Though he’s on our customer success team (because he’s great with people), he could probably be an engineer in another life. He also makes a killer bolognese his nonna passed onto him. Rick (Chief Commercial Officer) is a seasoned healthcare sales executive, leading large orgs at Jumo Health, Athenahealth, and Pfizer. He can put anyone at ease. On the weekends he’s driving his bulldozer tilling his farm. Jung (co-founder, CEO) was patient number one at One Medical: he helped the founder build the first financial model before the practice had a single location. He also built the compliance program there from scratch, which is why we're already SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant. He has a PhD in operations research, which means the person running ops here thinks like an engineer. On the weekends you can find him at the farmers market selling kimchi in honor of his mother. Eric (co-founder, CPO) was my college classmate, and we played on the same rec league basketball team before we decided to build together. He was working in ML/NLP before ChatGPT existed, which means he knew this business was possible before most people were even asking the question. Eric’s the reason we’re building in healthcare specifically… but I’ll let him tell you that story. Me (Aaron, co-founder, CTO): Eric and I have been friends since before any of this existed. I think the best thing I can say about what it’s like to work with me is that he’s still here. Requirements You have 8+ years of engineering experience and at least 1 year in a leadership role: EM, TL, Head of Eng, CTO, or something equivalent. You’re backend-leaning full stack, strong in Python and hands-on experience in infra and scaling.You have a CS or STEM degree, or the kind of practical experience that makes the degree irrelevant. Experience in a compliance-heavy or regulated industry is a plus, not because we need someone who knows the acronyms, but because you'll already understand why the constraints are real. And last but not least, you have a genuine belief that agentic tools are the future of how software gets built. Interview Process We move quickly: you’ll hear back within 48 hours after each round. This can be as fast as two weeks end-to-end. 30-minute founder intro call 1-hour technical phone screen: you’ll problem-solve through an evolving technical challenge Full-day onsite in San Francisco. We’ll work through real customer problems together. If your schedule allows, we’d love to make this a paid 3-day work trial. We think it’s the best way for both sides to know if there’s a real fit. Reference checks → Offer Benefits Excellent health, dental, and vision insurance Free dinner Free illy espresso, coffee, and beer Fitness stipend 💪 Commuter benefits Unlimited PTO 401(k) Relocation stipend Our Office (The Nest) In-person, Downtown SF by Montgomery BART. After years of remote work, we wanted to be in the same room again to brainstorm, whiteboard, and actually enjoy each other’s company. There’s high ownership, no BS meetings, and a ton of gourmet snacks. Once a week we also get out of the office for a team lunch… because some of the best conversations happen away from the whiteboards. Include a 🦜 in your application for extra credit. Aaron, Co-founder & CTO