Chief Product and Technology Officer

CareMessage

3d•$280,000 - $280,000•Remote

About The Position

CareMessage is seeking a Chief Product and Technology Officer who will decide where we place our product and technology bets, build the organization that delivers them, and prove that what we ship changes people’s health. Product management, product marketing, design, engineering, data and user research all report to this role, which replaces our outgoing Chief Technology Officer. We are a product-driven organization and have been since 2012. That describes how we decide, not whose work matters. Our engineering team built a platform that reaches millions of people reliably, integrates with the electronic health records our customers already use, and put an AI Assistant in the hands of frontline staff who kept using it. Three patents and 17 peer-reviewed studies sit behind our outcomes. The next build is harder, and you will need to be as serious about engineering as about product. The test of this seat is whether our strategy looks different because you are in it. You set the bets, how the organization is built to deliver them, and what we stop doing to make room. The Founders, in consultation with the Board, remain the authority on our mission, our values, and what health equity impact means here. Within that, the direction is yours. Other organizations leave the safety net as they scale. We go deeper into it. Our core operations are funded by our enterprise product, and philanthropy funds research into what comes next. Growing the core is what earns us the right to make bigger bets. More than anything, we want curiosity as a practice. Go find out. Be wrong out loud. Let what a clinic staff member tells you change your plan. The people we serve may be working two jobs, sharing a phone, or reading most easily in a language other than English. We can teach you this market. We cannot teach you to want to understand people whose lives look different from your own.

Requirements

You have run multiple functions together, and you can point to outcomes you owned rather than features your team shipped.
You have set a direction an organization followed, presented to a board, and built people who went on to bigger jobs.
You have changed an engineering organization's technical direction without authority over it, and you can explain the argument well enough for an engineer to judge it. This one is not negotiable.
You are curious as a practice. You go find out. You are willing to be wrong out loud. Your view of patients and frontline staff came from being around them.
You want to go deeper into the safety net, not upmarket. Most product leaders build a career moving toward better-funded customers. This job runs the other way, and it will not suit someone who sees low-income populations as a stage.
You treat intellectual property as an asset rather than a legal formality, whether that is patents, published evidence, proprietary data, or all three.
You do not need to be writing code, to have held this title before, or to know healthcare interoperability standards. You need to be able to choose the bets, build the team, and prove the impact.
If you do not match every line here, apply anyway, especially if you come from an under-represented background.

Nice To Haves

First-hand understanding of the people we serve is a requirement of this job rather than an optional extra.

Responsibilities

Build the organization’s capabilities to deliver health equity impact through technology
Lead, coach and develop 30+ people across product management, product marketing, design, software engineering, data, and user research, and grow those teams so they more directly own key outcomes that support how our organization intends to grow. Build the bench and succession beneath you so our capability outlasts any one leader.
Accelerate our organizational ability to deliver health equity impact. We were an early adopter of generative artificial intelligence and our AI Assistant is live and widely used by frontline staff. The larger opportunity is what this organization can achieve when we adapt innovative technologies both in our products and within our internal teams, so that we scale our impact without scaling our cost base proportionally.
Leverage our Board, advisors, and broader ecosystem as core enablers and force-multipliers. Tapping into their deep line of sight across healthcare and tech ensures we lock onto the highest-impact focus areas with speed.
Decide where CareMessage places the product and technology bets that maximize impact on health equity
Set the direction across access to care, clinical outcomes and the social drivers of health, toward demonstrating 5 million people had a measurable health equity improvement a year by 2028. Set the technical direction that delivers on this, grounding everything you do in what you learn from patients and safety-net staff, not in a playbook you brought with you.
Decide how we allocate. Every invested dollar lands in one of three places. Work that moves health equity outcomes, work that keeps us competitive in a crowded market and maintenance, and technical debt that keeps the platform standing. Push as much as you can into the first without letting the other two decay, and be plain with the Executive Team about what the split is and why you chose it. Deciding what we will not pursue is part of the same call. We hold several hypotheses about how to scale our impact, and the discipline is to test them without risking what funds us.
Grow the enterprise product that funds our core operations and reaches our target populations at scale, and find the room that remains in the healthcare safety-net market. Our model is that philanthropy invents a capability and earned revenue keeps it, so deciding what has proven itself and is ready to graduate into the Core is part of this job.
Prove our products meaningfully solve for health equity outcomes and maximize their reach
Own adoption. We serve 1 in 6 FQHCs and 1 in 7 Free and Charitable Clinics, alongside Tribal health organizations and their networks. But a signed contract is not an outcome because real impact requires active usage. Resource-constrained clinics will not adopt software just because it is good. Your job is to convert one-time campaigns into self-sustaining workflows and build low-touch paths so the smallest organizations succeed independently. Partnering with our Chief Growth Officer on pricing, packaging, and positioning, you will ensure no segment is left behind by balancing commercial growth with mission impact.
Own our intellectual property. Our core IP is behavior change, backed by patents on sequential messaging and 17 peer-reviewed studies. This makes us the only patient engagement platform with published clinical outcomes for low-income populations. You will direct our IP strategy: deciding what we protect, what we publish, and how we generate clinical evidence far faster than traditional trial cycles allow.
Own the technical partnerships and infrastructure. Patients navigate clinics, food banks, and housing programs that operate in silos. We build the connective tissue through deep EHR integrations, a unified cross-organization patient record, and scalable APIs that let new partners plug in without custom code. You will own our technical partner relationships and the underlying infrastructure that connects the safety net.

Benefits

Paid parental leave for biological and adopted children
18 paid company holidays, including a one week mid-year and one week end-of-year break
9 wellness days to be used for self-care- or anything that comes up in life
15 days of PTO
1-month (20 working days) paid sabbatical after the 4-year anniversary, and every 4 years thereafter
Generous medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families
Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts
Short & long-term disability insurance
$100 per employee yearly wellness budget, with flexibility to spend on physical, emotional, and mental wellness resources
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