Who are we?
Paxos Appeals empowers patients facing high-cost medical treatments to secure the health insurance coverage they deserve. Our tech-enabled service uses AI to write appeals for patients after their health insurers deny coverage for medical treatments.
To disempower individuals, giant bureaucracies like health insurance companies create opaque mazes of paperwork and hoops to jump through. But generative AI has the power to level the playing-field between regular people and large organizations by doing the paperwork and jumping through hoops, which enables individuals to stand up for themselves across healthcare and beyond.
Background: Approximately 15% of all health insurance claims are denied, and denial-rates rose by 18% from 2020 to 2023, in part due to insurance companies weaponizing AI to deny claims. Less than 1% of patients appeal their denials, yet over 40% of those appeals are successful. (And our appeals have a denial-overturn rate of >90%.)
Our progress: So far, we've won patients over $2M in health insurance coverage. We've been operating since May 2023, generating revenue from day 1 as a bootstrapped services business. We won the Stanford Impact Founder and IDIF fellowships, as well as seven startup competitions. We raised VC funding and have ample runway. We've established six partnerships with healthcare providers and seven partnerships with health insurance attorneys. Here is a Stanford article about us.
Who are you?
You will be our first hire beyond our three cofounders. We have a roadmap ready to go.
We are seeking an ambitious individual who is passionate about our mission to help individuals fight bureaucracies, excited to work in a fast-paced early startup environment, and ready to take on the challenge of building our tech stack from 0 to 1.
You see the bigger picture and are eager to contribute to product development and strategy.
Job Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction of the company. We've spent years finding product-market fit and have an established operational process, and it's finally time to build the tech to automate that process; you will lead that effort and contribute to the overall company strategy.
- AI capabilities: Explore and implement generative AI solutions for our service offerings. This will involve Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), advanced prompt engineering, and web and phone agents. Foundational model training won't be necessary.
- Workflow automation: Apply off-the-shelf tools, APIs, or custom software to automate manual processes.
- Other elements based on your learning goals: If there are other aspects of the company you're interested in working on, we'd love to involve you!
Currently, we are operating our service using a combination of manual and automated workflows using off-the-shelf tools. For our next set of systems, our initial plan is to use Langchain, Retool, and specialized AI offerings (RAG, web agents, phone agents, etc.), but there is significant opportunity for you to guide decisions on our tech-stack.
While you'll own the tech stack, you'll receive significant support from the founders on Product, Ops, and Business Development.
Pending performance and your interest, there is an opportunity for promotion to Chief Technology Officer as we build out our engineering team over time.
Qualifications
We're open to adjusting the below requirements for the right candidate. Internships and side-projects can count towards these requirements.
Required qualifications:
- Minimum of 2 years software engineering experience
- Ability to work in person at least 3 days per week on average in NYC or San Francisco
- Entrepreneurial spirit: self-starting, scrappy, growth mindset, ability to collaborate with a team, comfort with ambiguity and constant change
Preferred qualifications:
- 4+ years of software engineering experience
- Experience working at an early-stage startup
- Experience streamlining/automating manual workflows
- Experience building a tech-enabled service
- Experience applying AI in business and operational contexts, including RAG apps, prompt engineering, AI pipelines, etc. (foundational AI experience not necessary)
- Experience building products or services in the healthcare industry, or even better, healthcare revenue cycle management
Compensation
Competitive salary plus a very generous equity package, commensurate with candidate's qualifications and experience. Strong health benefits (medical, dental, vision).
More on our company
Our founding team: We come out of Stanford, with Haley and Alex receiving MBAs and Malcolm receiving a B.S. in Human Biology. Previously, Haley was an engineer in the healthcare industry, and Alex was a product manager at Meta and Microsoft and a serial startup founder. All three team members have significant experience working with engineers and other technical teammates, and we place strong value in those team-members. See our About Us page for more details on our team.
This is a deeply personal mission for us. In 2021, Alex was denied by insurance for a $40,000 medical procedure and had to resort to Reddit where an anonymous user, who also had previously successfully appealed their denial, helped Alex write his appeal. That anonymous user's advice worked: Alex won his appeal! Later, at Stanford, Alex met Haley, and they decided to start a venture to help patients navigate health insurance appeals, driven by Alex's personal experience. Soon, Alex and Haley discovered another Stanford student was working on a similar project. It turns out, that Stanford student was the same anonymous Reddit user that had helped Alex in 2021: Malcolm. They decided to join forces and have been working together on Paxos Appeals ever since.
Vibes: We're an early-stage startup and you can therefore expect a fast-paced, dynamic, and exciting working environment.