Head of Research [NYC of SF]

Amigo•New York, NY

4d•$300,000 - $500,000•Onsite

About The Position

Amigo is building the clinical AI infrastructure that health systems, life sciences companies, payors, and government agencies use to run their patient-facing care. Their agents support the entire patient journey, from pre-visit intake to ongoing monitoring. The company's mission is to make excellent care accessible to every patient, not limited by clinician time. Amigo is rebuilding the medical record as a timeline of clinical events, with agents running on top that improve with each patient interaction. Unlike single-purpose chatbots or scribes, Amigo serves as a platform for customers to build their own agents, requiring work that is robust across specialties, workflows, and regulatory environments. The company's agents have supported over 4 million patient encounters and are projected to grow tenfold this year, with validation through partnerships with leading academic medical institutions. Amigo has secured Series A funding from investors like Madrona, General Catalyst, and Optum Ventures. The team consists of approximately 35 people working in person in New York City and San Francisco, with a focus on craft, clinical rigor, and the speed at which good ideas reach patients. The role emphasizes measuring work by outcomes rather than releases.

Requirements

A track record of running research programs—not just contributing to them. You have owned scope, people, timelines, and the decision to stop
A background in AI for health at a research lab or an equivalent setting. Work on systems like Google DeepMind's AMIE, or leading health research efforts at a major lab, is the shape we have in mind
A public record of rigorous work: publications, evaluation studies, benchmarks, or systems other researchers use
Fluency in clinical evaluation, including study design, what counts as evidence in medicine, and why a benchmark result is not a clinical claim
Experience hiring and developing researchers, and building the practices a research function runs on
Comfort in policy and regulatory conversations, and the judgment to communicate limitations clearly
Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make technical work credible to clinical and non-technical audiences
A strong sense of ownership, and the willingness to build the function rather than inherit it

Nice To Haves

Clinical training. Practising or former clinicians who moved into research are very welcome
Experience with regulatory submissions, clinical trials, or evidence generation for a regulated product
Experience evaluating agentic or multi-step LLM systems rather than single-turn models
Existing relationships across academic medicine or health policy

Responsibilities

Build and lead the research team by hiring researchers and setting the research agenda with our CTO
Own how we evaluate clinical agents, including benchmarks, patient simulation, diagnostic reasoning evaluation, and the standards a system must meet before it reaches a patient
Design and run studies that hold up to clinical scrutiny, and decide which programs continue and which should stop
Publish, and turn our existing academic partnerships into substantive collaborations rather than logos
Represent Amigo’s research externally to clinicians, regulators, academic partners, and the wider research community
Own how we describe what our systems can and cannot do, including limitations, with the judgment that regulated communication requires
Work directly with the clinicians on our team so evaluation reflects real clinical practice
Translate findings into product decisions, working with engineering and the deployment teams so research changes what we ship