🧬 Background: let's accelerate medical innovation
At Power, we're making clinical trials easy to navigate for all patients.
Today, patients look to promising medical research when standard treatments have failed them. Unfortunately, there is no single source of truth that patients can understand and trust. The status quo is a government run website which is written in complex medical jargon that is impossible for most people to navigate.
At the same time, clinical trials are the bottleneck on medical innovation—new medicine takes almost 10 years to test and over 86% of all clinical trials are delayed because they can't find enough patients. This is one of the biggest problems facing the life science industry.
Power is the easiest way for patients to access promising new studies. Thus helping more patients find treatments and speeding up the progress of medical research as we go.
🏹 The role
Background
We’re looking for someone to be the tip of the spear on one of our most promising new products: our synthetic research coordinator (an AI-powered, patient screening voice bot).
Currently, the volume of calls being made by clinic staff to our patients is the rate limiting step across our entire marketplace. While other teams work to drive this up, you’ll be working to remove this step in the funnel altogether, by leveraging LLMs and voice models to automate away the need for a prescreening phone call.
We’ve built a proof of concept for this system, and so far the clinical teams love it: they save a tremendous amount of time on the phone, and are able to schedule more patients in a given week. We’re seeing them proactively emailing us to let us know ways that the bot could be more effective in its screening.
That said, the experience overall has a long way to go: only 15% of our patients end up completing this digital prescreening call.
Your Focus
As the product engineer leading this project, you’ll be responsible for everything from driving the key architectural decisions to refining the overarching experience.
You’ll work with design and product to build out a seamless, high-converting intake for patients, and work with clinic research coordinators to ensure the outputs of the call adequately meet their needs. You’ll also work with the broader engineering team to parse these outputs into a structured patient profile, which will power recommendations for the patient down the line.
Once this synthetic research coordinator is effectively screening a high volume of in-app patients with depression & anxiety, you’ll take lead on expanding the product across a few different dimensions:
- Launching the bot for new condition areas, in a way that scales effectively as we go from 2, to 4 to 16 different condition areas.
- Bringing the same automated prescreening experience to a) outbound calling and b) inbox-based messaging, such that we can ensure we’re maximizing our ability to verify a given patient’s answers.
This project is critical, not just for our performance in 2025, but also for our ability to break into new categories throughout 2026.
Given this, we expect we’ll eventually need other team members to join your pod and help drive the initiative forward. In all likelihood, you’ll be asked to take on the role of team lead here: helping shape their work up, while refining both their product + engineering taste.
Further, our technical norms around working with LLMs, and especially voice models, are still in their infancy. We’ll be looking to you to take on a technical leadership role by helping define and enforce these norms as you’re building.
🤔 This role probably is not a good fit, if:
- You dislike thinking about a broader user experience: you’d rather focus on the “how” than the “what.”
- You’d rather not have to spend time collaborating with design, product, or other cross functional team members.
- You’re uncomfortable with the highly uncertain nature of voice products.
- It’s much harder to constrain the answer-space in a transcript than in a form, which means that it’s both more important and more difficult to well-manage edge cases in a call.
- You don’t want to build a deep understanding of how patients are assessed to be a fit for a given medication or clinical trial.
- Odds are, you’re going to need to develop real domain-specific knowledge in order to deliver an exceptional product.
- Relatedly, you hate the idea of spending time directly speaking with end users (both patients and clinic staff).
- You’re uncomfortable working on projects that directly translate to key business metrics, or having the impact of your work assessed through this lens.
- You’re at a point in your career where you don’t yet want to be driving large technical decisions, or accountable for a sizeable product surface area.
🔎 The product
Power is the only consumer-grade platform for clinical trials.
- Comprehensive: we make it easy to search across every trial in North America so patients never feel like they have blind spots
- Simple: we apply a healthy amount of data engineering and empathy to the reams of unstructured medical data on clinical trials to simplify things for patients that are trying to evaluate potential trials
- Connected: we help patients proactively reach out to the researchers directly and researchers love connecting with motivated patients
👋 The team
We're a team of experienced marketplace and healthtech builders with backing from some of the best across health tech and pharma.
Check out our team page
Given how small a team we are, you'll have tremendous impact on:
- Our company culture
- Our engineering norms
- The people we hire
- The products we deliver
We expect you to help shape our technical direction in addition to building an amazing product. We love things that compound, and create systems to facilitate this. We're well funded, so will be looking to you to drive a healthy balance between velocity and engineering excellence.
🧪 Our Stack
Most of the product you see when visiting www.withpower.com is driven by React using the NextJS framework, written in Typescript and deployed to AWS via FlightControl. Github helps us share changes with each other safely and securely, and Linear keeps us in sync. We also make use of various cloud service vendors including Google Cloud.
What do you like? What would you change? We believe in using the right tool to solve the right problem, and are open to change, but prefer boring technology when given a choice.
⚖️ Engineering Principles
We make decisions every day to improve our code, product, processes and working environments. There are always trade-offs, but we’ve observed these principles emerge on the team:
- Bias to ship
- Bugs happen, but shouldn’t fester
- Think twice, code once
- Only constant is change
- Marathon, not a sprint
✉️ If this sounds like your kind of adventure
We'd love to hear from you.
Email ed@withpower.com
In lieu of a cover letter, tell us about something you've built that you're proud about! Bonus points if it’s a Loom video with a screenshare walking us through the product and code!
❓ FAQ
Can you help me understand in more detail why we need a digital research coordinator?
Currently, after a patient applies to a trial on Power, we send this referral to a research coordinator at a nearby clinic. These coordinators demonstrate a huge variation in a) time to call a patient back, b) the number of patients they are willing to call in a day, and as a result c) the number of patients they’re able to enrol in a given time period.
As you can imagine, the slower, less consistent CRCs end up negatively impacting the experience for a patient in a huge way: getting ghosted after sharing your ~entire medical history feels awful.
Further, these low-performing clinics limit our ability to drive enrollments for our pharmaceutical customers. Given that pharma is paying us almost entirely per-enrollment, we have a huge incentive to find a way around these low-performing sites.
Your synthetic research coordinator is our primary answer here.
What is the culture like at Power?
A few values stand out: urgency, selflessness, agency, pragmatism. We’re looking for owners, so we hope you’ll help us expand this list.
What's your approach to remote work?
Power was born as a remote first team, and will always be open to senior individual contributors anywhere in the world.
That said, we’re increasingly moving towards a two-hub model:
- Most of our high-collaboration roles (product, design, biz ops, customer ops) will be hired in San Francisco moving forward.
- Our San Francisco team is in-person 4-5 days a week (Bask & Brandon will be in-person ~every day).
- We’ll continue to hire a strong engineering team in-and-around Toronto and Canada.
Outside of this, we've budgeted for quarterly team off sites over the course of the next year, as we believe work is more fun when you have a deep personal relationship with your colleagues.
What are the requirements? Do I need certain years of experience, or a background in healthcare?
We have no 'formal' experience requirement, but think it's important that our earliest team members are highly autonomous.
This means that you've been accountable for building large pieces of a product users love.
Inversely, if you're at a point in your career where active mentorship is very important to you, this role likely isn't a fit for you.
How is the work life balance?
At the highest level: we trust team members to manage their own schedules and we believe that taking time off to recharge makes you more productive in the long run.
The truth about early stage companies and small teams is that everyone’s work makes a big difference on the company’s trajectory. We’re not afraid to work hard if it’s impactful.
Typically, we check out around 6pm to protect family time and then log-in later to finish anything that was left undone.
How are you funded?
Happy to share specifics but we've raised a large Series A round from top investors. We've intentionally raised enough to comfortably get us through the messy 0 to 1 stage.
How does your interview process look?
We want to be transparent, fair and fast during your interview experience with Power. We aim to review your CV and introductory video in a business day after receiving it. We do our best to make sure the entire process takes no more than 2 weeks. Our process consists of a deep dive combined experience and technical interview. You’ll likely talk to one or both of the founders as well. You then hear back about next steps by the next business day. We want to respect your time, and not leave you wondering what is happening next.
How big is this market?
Clinical trial recruiting is $3B dollars annually. Total spend on clinical trial operations is $180B annually.
Diversity is a priority for our team. Historically, clinical research has been terrible about including diverse populations. This is problematic because the efficacy and safety of medicine may differ by age, sex, race, and ethnicity. As a result, we draw healthcare conclusions that don’t actually reflect the outcomes for various groups (source).
Power exists to empower all patients, and that starts with having a diverse team.
Highly autonomous engineer accountable for large product areas, architectural decisions, user experience, cross-functional collaboration, LLM and voice-model development, and direct engagement with patients and clinic staff.
Key Responsibilities
- building products
- leading projects
- shaping architecture
Skills & Tools
React, NextJS, Typescript, AWS, FlightControl, Github, Linear, Google Cloud, LLMs
Job Details
- Category: Software Development
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time
- Workplace: Remote — San Francisco or Toronto
- Languages: English
About Power Life Sciences, Inc.
A consumer-grade clinical trial platform that helps patients discover studies and connect with researchers. — Industry: Healthcare