Head of Research [NYC or SF]

Job description

# About Amigo At Amigo, we're building the clinical AI infrastructure that health systems, life sciences companies, payors, and government agencies run their patient-facing care on. Our agents work across the whole patient journey: pre-visit intake, care navigation, post-visit care plans, and ongoing monitoring. Our mission is to make excellent care accessible to every patient, not rationed by the limits of clinician time. This hasn’t been solved because the underlying record was never built for it. EHRs were designed for billing, not for systems that learn. So instead of layering another point solution on top, we’re rebuilding the medical record as a timeline of clinical events and running agents on top of it that improve with every patient interaction. Unlike single-purpose chatbots or scribes, Amigo is the platform our customers use to build their own agents. That means our work has to hold up across specialties, workflows, and regulatory environments and not just one narrow use case. Our agents have supported more than 4 million patient encounters and are on track to grow tenfold this year. Our work is validated through partnerships with leading academic medical institutions. We’re fresh off our Series A, backed by Tier 1 VCs such as Madrona, General Catalyst, and Optum Ventures. We’re a small team of around 35 people, working in person in New York City and San Francisco. We care deeply about craft, clinical rigor, and the speed at which good ideas reach patients. If you want your work to be measured in outcomes rather than releases, we’d like to hear from you. # About this role Clinical AI is only worth deploying if someone can demonstrate that it works. Our agents have supported millions of patient encounters, which means we’re held to a clinical standard and trust is earned from clinicians, regulators, and academic reviewers. As Head of Research, you’ll own that case. You’ll build Amigo’s research function from the ground up: hiring researchers, setting the agenda alongside our CTO, and owning how our systems are evaluated. That includes benchmarks, patient simulation, diagnostic reasoning evaluation, and the studies that show a clinical agent behaves appropriately in the settings where it is actually deployed. You’ll also own how this work reaches the outside world through publications, academic collaborations, and the regulatory and policy conversations that follow. Research sits unusually close to the product here. We deploy into live health systems, so findings are expected to change what we ship and the standards you set determine what’s allowed in front of patients. You’ll work directly with the clinicians on our team so the research reflects how medicine is practiced, not just how it appears in a dataset. This role blends scientific leadership with organizational judgment. You’ll be building a function, not joining one, while representing Amigo’s technical credibility externally. The ideal candidate brings deep research expertise, the operational discipline to run programs to completion (and stop them when appropriate), and the communication skills to make rigorous work legible to clinical and regulatory audiences. # What you'll do - 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 # What we're looking for - 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 have - 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 # Benefits (available to Full-Time Employees) ## Health & Wellness - Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance - Daily catered lunch and dinner - Mental health support and wellness coaching - Flexible wellness stipend for fitness, therapy, or personal growth ## Growth & Development - Annual learning budget for courses, books, or conferences - Conference attendance budget for professional development - Annual team offsite - Academic collaboration opportunities - Unlimited PTO # Our Core Values 1. **Patients Win, We Win** If patients aren't getting better care, we haven't earned the right to scale. Every internal decision gets pressure-tested: does this make patients' lives better? If we can't draw the line, we question why we're doing it. 2. **High Standards, High Care** We hold a high bar for the team because patients are counting on us to get this right. But high standards only work with genuine investment in each other. You can take risks, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas—not despite our standards, but because of them. 3. **Thoughtful Urgency** We move fast by default, but speed without judgment is recklessness. The discipline is knowing which decisions are reversible vs. not. In healthcare AI, the companies that win will be fast everywhere they can be and careful everywhere they must be. We build the muscle to do both. 4. **Intensely Measured** We instrument patient outcomes, provider ROI, system performance, and clinical accuracy. But data without action is surveillance. Every metric should have an owner, a threshold, and a response plan. If we're measuring something but never acting on it, we stop measuring it. # Who Builds With Us - **Low ego:** Politics and territory don't interest you. The best ideas win, regardless of who has them. - **Direct:** You say the hard thing, challenge ideas openly, and commit fully once decided. - **High agency:** You thrive on trust rather than instruction. When you see something is broken, you fix it. You don’t file tickets and wait for someone else. - **Bar of excellence:** You hold yourself to a bar most people wouldn't, and you want teammates who do the same. - **Skeptical:** You push back on rules that don’t make sense and question assumptions that haven’t earned their place.