Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.
Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.
The Role
We are seeking a proven engineering leader to guide and direct our newly formed Product Foundations organization. This is a critical, high-impact role responsible for creating the foundational software and services that our Product and Data Engineering organizations use to build and innovate Cedar’s products.
Your mission will be to accelerate the entire engineering organization by providing reliable, scalable, and easy-to-use systems and platforms. The existing teams that will operate under your leadership include our Payments Foundations, Comms Foundations, App Foundations & DevEx, and ML/AI Foundations teams.
You will co-author and establish the vision for this new org, and advance the next chapter of our strategy for our foundational service offerings, further increasing developer velocity and enabling our product teams to build at scale. This includes partnering with your peers across the engineering and product management orgs to identify and build new foundational offerings, while also leading the strategic effort to extract core services from our product monolith where that makes sense. You will be responsible for leading your teams, in partnership with product management, in creating clear roadmaps that balance immediate customer needs with long-term architectural and operational health.
What this role is NOT: This is not an infrastructure, DevOps, or IT role. This role does not involve managing data platforms, cloud infra, or network engineering. If these are where your platform experience lies, this is not the right role for you.
We are looking for a leader with deep experience in:
- Building, operating, and scaling critical backend systems, components, and shared services for internal product engineering customers.
- Developing a compelling vision and roadmap by deeply understanding customer needs while also anticipating future requirements.
- Designing effective systems with clear ownership boundaries, high availability, and robust observability.
- Leading high-performing teams, holding a high bar for technical excellence, efficient delivery, and collaborative culture.
In this position you will:
- Strategy & Vision
- Define and Drive the vision, charter, and long-term strategy for the Product Foundations organization to maximize impact on business goals and developer productivity.
- Architect the Organization: Assess current team structures and shape the organization for maximum alignment, efficiency, and future growth.
- Develop and Champion robust, transparent roadmaps, advocating for the resources required to deliver on them and communicating progress to stakeholders across the company.
- Demonstrate Creativity and Resourcefulness to make the most of your existing resources while avoiding team burnout scenarios.
- People & Team Leadership
- Lead and Mentor a high-performing organization of engineering managers, staff, and principal engineers, fostering a culture of excellence and accountability.
- Build the Future: Actively hire and develop the next generation of technical and people leaders within the organization.
- Technical Execution & Collaboration
- Lead Architectural Evolution: Influence Cedar’s overall technical architecture by establishing clear ownership and API boundaries, including leading the extraction of functionality into standalone services and libraries.
- Partner for Foundational Needs: Collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering to identify their core needs, creating a strategic path to offload foundational systems they currently maintain.
- Enable AI/ML Innovation: Collaborate with subject matter experts to spearhead the creation of core platforms and systems required to enable the broader adoption of generative AI and ML within Cedar's products.
- Operational Excellence
- Foster a Culture of Reliability: Ensure incidents are managed swiftly and lead to durable improvements. Drive the evolution of foundational systems for higher stability, observability, and performance.
- Instill Engineering Discipline: Establish and maintain a culture of metrics-driven decision-making, with robust monitoring, alerting, and quality standards.
What we look for in an ideal candidate:
- Must Haves:
- 10+ years of experience in software development, with at least 3 of those years leading/on teams building core product systems for internal customers.
- 5+ years of total experience in a leadership role, directly managing engineering teams.
- 2+ years of total experience managing managers.
- Experience leading organizations of 30+ people.
- Experience utilizing build and release platforms and testing frameworks.
- Proven track record of successful project delivery and customer satisfaction, including technical change management.
- Your default reaction to seeing a problem is to take initiative and own finding a solution.
- Excellent cross-functional stakeholder management experience to navigate trade-off discussions and negotiate priorities.
- Extremely strong, proactive, and transparent communication style, both verbal and written.
- Strong process orientation around getting things done at scale - you are comfortable with project management methodologies but believe Process Pays Rent and can adapt the right agile delivery model for the team.
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with competing priorities.
- You demonstrate confidence in making decisions, sharing strong opinions, but remaining open to new perspectives.
- You are passionate about creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment where collaboration is a fundamental part of how you work.
- Nice to Haves:
- Experience leading developer experience efforts including build and release platforms and testing frameworks.
- Experience working on projects that leverage ML and/or AI.
- Previous healthcare experience.
Compensation Range and Benefits
- Salary/Hourly Rate Range*: $255,000-300,000
- This role is equity eligible
- This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package
*Subject to location, experience, and education
#LI-Remote #LI-JJ2
What do we offer to the ideal candidate?
- A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
- Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
- For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
- 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
- Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians)
- Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
- Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
- Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally
About us
Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.
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What We Do
Cedar is the AI-powered healthcare financial experience platform, built for the rising cost and complexity of healthcare payments. We help millions of people every year understand and resolve their medical bills with clarity and compassion, while helping healthcare organizations operate more efficiently. We’re combining AI, smart design, and empathy to fix one of healthcare’s most urgent crises.
Why Work With Us
Built on over a billion patient interactions, our platform unifies billing, payments, coverage, and support into one intelligent solution that learns and adapts, delivering stronger results for providers and more empathetic, affordable experiences for patients. We co-innovate with healthcare leaders to make care more accessible and affordable.
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Employees work remotely.
Cedar has adopted a hybrid work model that enables all Cedarians to work in a way that best serves them. For some, that means working from our NYC HQ. Most, (two-thirds) of our employees work remotely and only come to our office for team on-sites
