Software Engineer

🧬 Let's accelerate medical innovation

At Power, we're making clinical trials easy to navigate for all patients.

Today, patients look to promising medical research when standard treatments have failed them. Unfortunately, there is no single source of truth that patients can understand and trust. The status quo is a government run website which is written in complex medical jargon that is impossible for most people to navigate.

At the same time, clinical trials are the bottleneck on medical innovation—new medicine takes almost 10 years to test and over 86% of all clinical trials are delayed because they can't find enough patients. This is one of the biggest problems facing the life science industry.

Power is the easiest way for patients to access promising new studies. Thus helping more patients find treatments and speeding up the progress of medical research as we go.

🏹 The role

We're hiring for our core engineering team and are looking for senior product engineers to roll up their sleeves and build with us.

Given how small a team we are, you'll have tremendous impact on:

• Our company culture
• Our engineering norms
• The people we hire
• The products we deliver

We expect you to help shape our technical direction in addition to building an amazing product. We love things that compound, and create systems to facilitate this. We're well funded, so will be looking to you to drive a healthy balance between velocity and engineering excellence.

🤔 Some of the problems we'll be working on

We don't believe in strict job requirements, but if these problems sound fun and familiar, you're probably well suited for this gig:

1. Building out infrastructure and product experiences for marketplace businesses
2. Helping patients find, understand, and evaluate promising treatments for their medical conditions
3. Helping patients navigate the healthcare payor-provider system as they assess different treatment options
4. Making sense of unstructured medical data sources and translating it into plain-English using modern NLP tools
5. Building products that plug into existing workflows for healthcare operations

🔎 The product

Power is the only consumer-grade platform for clinical trials.

• Comprehensive: we make it easy to search across every trial in North America so patients never feel like they have blind spots
• Simple: we apply a healthy amount of data engineering and empathy to the reams of unstructured medical data on clinical trials to simplify things for patients that are trying to evaluate potential trials
• Connected: we help patients proactively reach out to the researchers directly and researchers love connecting with motivated patients

👋 The team

We're a team of experienced marketplace and healthtech builders with backing from some of the best across health tech and pharma.

Check out our team page

🧪 Our Stack

Most of the product you see when visiting www.withpower.com is driven by React using the NextJS framework, written in Typescript and deployed to AWS via FlightControl. Github helps us share changes with each other safely and securely, and Linear keeps us in sync. We also make use of various cloud service vendors including Google Cloud.

What do you like? What would you change? We believe in using the right tool to solve the right problem, and are open to change, but prefer boring technology when given a choice.

⚖️ Engineering Principles

We make decisions every day to improve our code, product, processes and working environments. There are always trade-offs, but we’ve observed these principles emerge on the team:

• Bias to ship
• Bugs happen, but shouldn’t fester
• Think twice, code once
• Only constant is change
• Marathon, not a sprint

✉️ If this sounds like your kind of adventure

We'd love to hear from you.

Email brandon@withpower.com

In lieu of a cover letter, tell us about something you've built that you're proud about! Bonus points if it’s a Loom video with a screenshare walking us through the product and code!

❓ FAQ

What is the culture like at Power?

A few values stand out: urgency, selflessness, agency, pragmatism. We’re looking for owners, so we hope you’ll help us expand this list.

What's your approach to remote work?

Power was born as a remote first team, and will always be open to senior individual contributors anywhere in the world.

That said, we’re increasingly moving towards a two-hub model:

• Most of our high-collaboration roles (product, design, biz ops, customer ops) will be hired in San Francisco moving forward.
  • Our San Francisco team is in-person 4-5 days a week (Bask & Brandon will be in-person ~every day).
• We’ll continue to hire a strong engineering team in-and-around Toronto and Canada.

Outside of this, we've budgeted for quarterly team off sites over the course of the next year, as we believe work is more fun when you have a deep personal relationship with your colleagues.

What are the requirements? Do I need certain years of experience, or a background in healthcare?

We have no 'formal' experience requirement, but think it's important that our earliest team members are highly autonomous.

This means that you've been accountable for building large pieces of a product users love.

Inversely, if you're at a point in your career where active mentorship is very important to you, this role likely isn't a fit for you.

How is the work life balance?

At the highest level: we trust team members to manage their own schedules and we believe that taking time off to recharge makes you more productive in the long run.

The truth about early stage companies and small teams is that everyone’s work makes a big difference on the company’s trajectory. We’re not afraid to work hard if it’s impactful.

Typically, we check out around 6pm to protect family time and then log-in later to finish anything that was left undone.

How are you funded?

Happy to share specifics but we've raised a large Series A round from top investors. We've intentionally raised enough to comfortably get us through the messy 0 to 1 stage.

How does your interview process look?

We want to be transparent, fair and fast during your interview experience with Power. We aim to review your CV and introductory video in a business day after receiving it. We do our best to make sure the entire process takes no more than 2 weeks. Our process consists of a deep dive combined experience and technical interview. You’ll likely talk to one or both of the founders as well. You then hear back about next steps by the next business day. We want to respect your time, and not leave you wondering what is happening next.

How big is this market?

Clinical trial recruiting is $3B dollars annually. Total spend on clinical trial operations is $180B annually.

Diversity is a priority for our team. Historically, clinical research has been terrible about including diverse populations. This is problematic because the efficacy and safety of medicine may differ by age, sex, race, and ethnicity. As a result, we draw healthcare conclusions that don’t actually reflect the outcomes for various groups (source).

Power exists to empower all patients, and that starts with having a diverse team.