Engineering Manager

Job Description

At PicnicHealth, we’re building the future of non-interventional clinical research, powered by AI and centered on patients. Our mission is to make it radically easier, faster, and more affordable to perform clinical trials and get better treatments to patients. We’re replacing the legacy, services-heavy model with a modern, AI-first approach that unlocks insights from rich, multi-modal data—from clinical notes and imaging to lab results—at scale.  By engaging patients directly through our personal health assistant, PicnicAI, which meets them where they’re at and delights them along the way (with an industry leading NPS of 76), patients participate actively in the research they care about.

PicnicHealth is already a trusted partner to 7 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies. Our work spans 40+ disease areas and has supported over 60 peer-reviewed publications, including an FDA submission that incorporates PicnicHealth data.

Founded in 2014, we’ve raised $100M+ from top investors like Amplify Partners, Felicis Ventures, B Capital Group, and Y Combinator. Our business running non-interventional studies more than doubled last year, and we’re growing even faster in 2026. We’re a team of doctors, patients, data nerds, engineers, and builders, reimagining how clinical research works — and we’re just getting started!

The Opportunity

We’re hiring an Engineering Manager to own and evolve the production systems that operationalize AI across PicnicHealth’s clinical data platform. This is a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ hands-on technical leadership and people management role. You’ll spend half your time writing production code alongside a team of 3 engineers, and you’ll be directly accountable for how these systems perform in production.

The Capture team builds the systems that turn AI from an assistant into the primary driver of clinical data workflows—retrieving medical records,, abstracting clinical data, and ensuring quality at scale. These are human-in-the-loop systems where AI does the heavy lifting and humans provide oversight, correction, and quality assurance. You’ll build the systems that operationalize these AI capabilities: workflow orchestration, error and edge case surfacing, audit trails, and the interfaces that let clinical users understand, trust, and correct AI outputs.

We believe speed and quality reinforce each other—even in a regulated environment. Fast iteration, tight feedback loops, and frequent shipping are how you build trust in AI-powered systems. You’ll be expected to continuously improve how your team ships, including rethinking workflows as AI development agents reshape what’s possible in engineering.

What you’ll do:

• Write and ship production code weekly—you’ll be in the codebase alongside your team
• Drive a culture of shipping speed and continuous improvement—identify bottlenecks, reduce cycle times, and treat fast iteration as the primary mechanism for achieving quality in a regulated environment
• Build internal tools that give clinical and operations users visibility into AI decision-making, with appropriate guardrails, permissions, and correction workflows
• Work closely with an embedded AI engineer who owns prediction model quality, while you own the production systems, user-facing workflows, and speed gains that depend on those predictions
• Lead incident response and postmortems for team-owned systems; ensure failures result in durable fixes, not patches
• Mentor 3 engineers through building together—pairing, code review, and architectural decisions made in the context of real work
• Establish and maintain system reliability standards: monitoring, alerting, and continuous improvement loops that catch problems before users do

Our stack includes GCP, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Node.js, React, Hasura GraphQL, TypeScript, and dbt.

What You’ll Bring:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing engineers while staying deeply hands-on—you’ve continued to ship production code as a manager
• Owned production systems processing large volumes of unstructured or semi-structured data, with personal accountability for reliability and correctness
• Meaningful experience building and operating AI-powered systems in production—you understand what it takes to make AI work reliably at scale, not just call an API
• Built internal tools or platforms for non-technical or regulated users, with demonstrated sensitivity to trust, UX, and workflow fit
• Comfortable making high-stakes technical decisions with incomplete information—and accountable for the outcomes, including failures
• Operated in ambiguous environments where requirements evolve, tradeoffs are real, and you’re expected to drive clarity rather than wait for it
• Strong opinions on system observability, debugging, and operational excellence
• A track record of integrating AI into your engineering practices and workflows—not just the product you build, but how you build it. You have a point of view on how AI development agents are changing software engineering and ideas for how to stay ahead of that curve at PicnicHealth.

We expect all team members to be amazing in their roles and, ultimately, to move the PicnicHealth mission forward.

What is clinical research and why will PicnicHealth win?

Clinical research is the industry responsible for conducting studies to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and treatments. Better trials lead to faster, more cost-effective drug development, ultimately resulting in more and improved treatments for patients. However, the process remains highly inefficient. Trials are a major bottleneck in drug development, and the promising advancements in biotech cannot translate to real patient impact unless clinical research becomes faster and more efficient

The industry runs on outdated technology and manual processes. Research sites (hospitals, academic centers, doctors’ offices) are overburdened and under-resourced. Contract research organizations (CROs), the organizations that traditionally run clinical trials for life sciences companies, typically throw hundreds-of-thousands of man-hours wrangling sites and cobbling together vendor software.

PicnicHealth has built technology that uniquely positions us to run faster, cheaper, and more flexible studies while removing burden from sites:

• PicnicAI (trained on 350M+ clinician annotations over 100k+ patient records) is the only system that can effectively access and structure all participant EMR data trials need
• Our AI health assistant (NPS of 76 in 2024) guides participants through study activities and enables most to be done at home
• We’re an integrated solution — virtual site, CRO, and software platform — with AI built in from the ground up, initially focusing on non-interventional research.

The other perks & benefits you get when you work at PicnicHealth

We pay competitive salaries. Everyone on the team is an owner: all full time employees get competitive equity.

Target Base Salary Range: $200K - $230K

The base salary PicnicHealth offers may vary depending upon the scope, complexity, and autonomy of the position and on the candidate’s job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

We’re a remote first company, with teammates spread across the US. We support in-person gatherings, including co-working spaces and multi-day onsites, to build connections and move forward strategic initiatives. Expect to travel 2-4 times a year.  For our team members in the Bay Area, who prefer to work in person we can offer a hybrid set up to work from the SF office on a flexible schedule.

You also get:

• Comprehensive benefits including above market Health, Dental, Vision
• Family friendly environment
• Flexible time off
• 401k plan
• Free PicnicHealth account
• Equipment and internet funds for home office set up
• Wellness Stipend

PicnicHealth is committed to promoting an inclusive work environment free of discrimination and harassment. We value a diverse and balanced team where everyone can belong.