Head of AI

Develop Health • Menlo Park, CA

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

Develop Health is on a mission to use AI to radically accelerate access to life-saving medications. By automating complex, manual healthcare processes—like benefit verification and prior authorization—we’ve achieved 10x revenue growth over the past year, growing from $0 to >$10M in annual recurring revenue in less than 2 years, and currently help more than 400,000 new patients every month.
We’re partnering with some of the largest pharmacy benefit managers and payers in the nation, revolutionizing how healthcare interactions occur by eliminating human delays and inefficiencies. Our small, elite team of founders and engineers have previously launched and exited successful healthcare startups including Rupa Health and Canvas Medical. We are now scaling rapidly following a major funding round.
About the Role:
We're hiring a Head of AI to own the technical direction and execution of applied AI across the company. This is a deeply hands-on role—you'll spend the vast majority of your time building, evaluating, and shipping AI systems, not managing from a distance. You'll lead a small, senior AI team and work closely with the CTO to define how AI drives every part of our product and operations.
Our AI systems already handle hundreds of thousands of healthcare interactions monthly—voice agents, document processing, clinical decision support. You'll push what's possible: improving model performance, designing evaluation frameworks, building agent architectures, and staying at the frontier of what applied AI can do in a regulated industry. This is a role for someone who wants to shape AI strategy for a company growing 10x year-over-year while staying deep in the technical work.
What You'll Do — Impact In Your First 3–6 Months:
Take ownership of our AI systems end-to-end—models, prompts, evaluation pipelines, agent architectures—and identify the highest-leverage improvements.
Build and refine evaluation frameworks that rigorously measure model accuracy, reliability, and real-world clinical value.
Lead and grow the AI team while shipping code daily yourself—a player-coach position with heavy emphasis on building.
Define the applied AI roadmap with the CTO—where we invest in fine-tuning vs. prompting, where we build vs. buy, and how we stay ahead of a fast-moving field.
Deploy AI improvements into production: design APIs, optimize inference, and build the observability to know when things break.
What You'll Own — Driving Growth Beyond 12 Months:
Define and execute the company's AI strategy—how we use AI across product, operations, and internal tooling to maintain our competitive edge.
Scale our AI infrastructure to support 100x transaction volume while maintaining the reliability that healthcare demands.
Build the systems for continuous model improvement informed by production feedback and clinical outcomes.
Grow and develop the AI team—hire new engineers, mentor existing team members, and raise the bar on AI best practices across the engineering org.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning and AI, with a strong data science or ML background and deep experience applying AI to complex, real-world problems in production, not just research or prototypes.
• A track record of squeezing performance out of AI systems in messy domains - you know how to evaluate, iterate, and ship models that actually work under real constraints.
• Experience leading a team of engineers to design and deliver complex AI products end-to-end.
• A strong point of view on where applied AI is heading and how to use that to build competitive advantage—you follow the research and have opinions.
• Availability to work on-site in Menlo Park at least three days per week (Tuesday–Thursday).

Nice To Haves

• Experience in healthcare or health-tech AI—medical data, regulated environments, or clinical workflows.
• Prior startup or founding-team experience; comfort with ambiguity and speed.
• Experience building voice AI, agent architectures, or retrieval-augmented generation systems.
• Contributions to open-source AI projects or applied research.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of our AI systems end-to-end—models, prompts, evaluation pipelines, agent architectures—and identify the highest-leverage improvements.
• Build and refine evaluation frameworks that rigorously measure model accuracy, reliability, and real-world clinical value.
• Lead and grow the AI team while shipping code daily yourself—a player-coach position with heavy emphasis on building.
• Define the applied AI roadmap with the CTO—where we invest in fine-tuning vs. prompting, where we build vs. buy, and how we stay ahead of a fast-moving field.
• Deploy AI improvements into production: design APIs, optimize inference, and build the observability to know when things break.
• Define and execute the company's AI strategy—how we use AI across product, operations, and internal tooling to maintain our competitive edge.
• Scale our AI infrastructure to support 100x transaction volume while maintaining the reliability that healthcare demands.
• Build the systems for continuous model improvement informed by production feedback and clinical outcomes.
• Grow and develop the AI team—hire new engineers, mentor existing team members, and raise the bar on AI best practices across the engineering org.

Benefits

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity in a company growing 10x year-over-year.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage; flexible PTO.
• High-end workstation & tooling budget.
• The opportunity to define the AI strategy for a company that's already using AI to improve access to care for hundreds of thousands of patients.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed