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Founding Software Engineer

Redscissor

Redscissor

Software Engineering
Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2023
New York City, NY
About us
✂️
Red Scissor cuts the red tape between patients and their medicine. Our mission is to make using health care easy for everyone, starting with prescription drugs.
Health care in the US often feels impossible, especially when you need to use insurance. Just figuring out what benefits you’re entitled to requires hours of back-and-forth. It’s so common that healthcare researchers gave it a name: sludge. When dealing with serious health issues, you have no choice but to waste your energy battling the system to get what you need.
The problems show up most acutely and consistently with complex medications – these drugs make up 25%+ of all healthcare spend because they're the only way to treat many serious conditions. Unfortunately, they’re unaffordable without insurance, and the paperwork to get them approved takes weeks, if not months. A Washington Post reporter captured the experience poignantly in an article earlier this year.
Thanks to recent developments in healthcare regulation and technology, we are changing this. Red Scissor helps patients get the medicine they need at the lowest cost possible, as fast as possible, coordinating with any insurance and pharmacy. Patients and their doctors now have someone to rely on to ensure they get their medicine. And the same developments will allow us to drive similar change for other categories of healthcare. We are building a company that can handle the complexity of using health insurance for anyone.
We’re lucky to have the support of Thrive Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Vast Ventures, SV Angel, and many angel investors, and we are sufficiently funded for the next few years. We also have a large network of industry experts, many of whom are close friends, to advise us.
About the role
What we’re doing is super complex, both in terms of business context and the tech required. It requires understanding the intricacies of health insurance rules, archaic healthcare systems, and what makes experiences effective for patients, providers, and pharmacies. As a Founding Software Engineer, you'll help determine how we should use software to solve the problems we face and build the foundation of our platform.
This role will require you to develop a deep understanding of our product needs and feel comfortable operating independently. You’ll own large sections of our codebase and help define our roadmap and timelines for individual projects. That said, we are big believers in collaborative problem solving – while you will be responsible for delivering on key features, you will work together with the rest of the early team to build context and make decisions.
We know that the products and services we build and the reach they have, and therefore our chance of making a difference, will be better when we have more diverse perspectives. This is especially important in healthcare, where the problems affect everyone differently and disproportionately impact people in underserved communities. We’re excited to work with people from underrepresented backgrounds, and we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.
If you join, you will:
Become deeply familiar with the world of medication access, ranging from how health insurance processes works to how pharmacies deal with out-of-stock issues
Collaborate with the rest of our tech team and CEO to define our roadmap as we balance supporting patients with building a long-term profitable business
Scope and spearhead technical projects – this means establishing technical strategy, writing out design docs, full-stack programming, and owning feature launches, for:
User-facing web apps and internal tools
Data pipelines and data modeling engines
Integrations with third-party systems
Work with the rest of our early tech team to design and build a platform that can successfully:
Support patients in filling and managing their prescriptions
Source clinical and insurance data we need to do our work
Reduce administrative burden on providers so they can focus on clinical decisions
Help our internal teams process prescriptions and insurance work efficiently
We’ll be most excited if you:
Have experience working full-time as a software engineer
Have experience building data-intensive applications and complex integrations
Know how to operate independently when dealing with ambiguous problems
Are pragmatic and can see the bigger picture
Are high output and bias towards action
Are excited to be a part of our mission! We’re pumped about what we’re working towards, and we want you to be, too.
P.S. This is a list of ideal qualifications for this position. If you don't meet every single one of them, you should still consider applying!
How to Apply