Founding Product

Needle; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

In-office NY

Equity

Lunches at office

Dinner after hours

Referral bonus

Job summary

Penelope Health in New York is hiring its first product manager to design product with customers in mind. You will translate customer needs into the features we build with our API and MCP, working directly with the CEO and CTO.

You’ll turn their requests into concrete specifications and guardrails before engineering starts. Ideal candidates have 5+ years as a product manager, including at least 2 in healthcare, and a track record of delivering in early-stage startups.

Qualifications

• 5+ years as a product manager with 2+ years in healthcare.
• Experience shipping in early-stage startups and making complex work legible.
• Able to read API specs and translate needs into concrete work.
• Proven delivery track record and strong written communication.
• AI-native mindset, customer-facing and decision-focused.

Responsibilities

• Lead customer discovery with pilot clients and inform development with evidence.
• Write specs, evaluation sets, and acceptance gates for each surface.
• Own prioritization and release readiness with engineering and leadership.

Skills

Product management

Healthcare experience

API literacy

Customer discovery

Delivery track record

Tools

API specs

Prototype mindset

Job description

American healthcare providers spend hundreds of billions a year creating and optimizing health insurance claims. Payers spend a similar amount adjudicating them.

AI was supposed to fix this, but really it’s making things worse. Providers use AI to improve claims; payers deploy AI to deny them. Both sides spend more; neither gains. So we’re collapsing the middle of this negative-sum system and building the infrastructure that makes healthcare billing deterministic.

We’re converting payer policies and medical notes into computable contracts grounded in formal logic - exposed via API and MCP, evaluated at the point of care, optimized for token efficiency, latency, and accuracy. We’re replacing the adversarial back-and-forth between providers and payers with transparent, auditable, pre-agreed rules.

When we succeed, we’ll materially reduce the cost of care for the American patient.

About us

On September 18 we announced a $100 million commitment led by our new partners at Thoreau, alongside our existing investors Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments, Twine Ventures, and Seedcamp.

Ten months ago this company was two people and a question: will my insurance cover this procedure? Now we are hiring across New York and London to become the intelligence platform both sides of American healthcare build upon.

The role

Our first product manager. You design the product in the room with our customers.

You’ll work directly with Sohum (CEO) and Mattijs (CTO). Our customers are the companies that build on us. They describe what they need in the language of their own product. You turn it into what we build.

The split we’re envisioning (it will flex as we scale):

Customer discovery (~40%). Sit with our pilot clients and the teams integrating us, most weeks in their room or on their calls: watch how they call the API and MCP, find where our answers fall short of what their workflow needs, and bring back the next thing to build with the evidence attached.

Product definition (~30%). Write the specs, the evaluation sets, and the acceptance gates for each surface we ship. Decide what “correct” means for a client before engineering starts, and what we won’t ship until it meets that bar.

Delivery with engineering (~30%). Own prioritization and release readiness with Mattijs: what ships next, which of a client’s real cases it must pass first, and what we tell the client when it does.

About you

You have 5+ years as a product manager, at least 2 of them in healthcare (payer, provider, revenue cycle, or health tech).

You’ve shipped inside early-stage startups where the product was messy, and you made it legible.

You’re technical enough to read an API spec and argue with it, and you’d rather bring a working prototype to the meeting than a deck.

You have a consistent track record of delivery.

You are an excellent communicator - at Penelope, we think in writing and favor memos over slides.

You are AI-native - when you face hard problems repeatedly, your first instinct is to ask how you can automate the solution.

You’re happiest in a room with a customer, and you come back with a decision.

Not a fit if

You want a roadmap handed to you.

You’ve run product from dashboards and tickets, never from a customer’s own workflow.

You’re looking for a 9-to-5.

What we offer

$180k-260k + meaningful early equity

New York, in-office, with some flexibility

Lunches at the office: Wild Wednesday's (pitch crazy ideas), Friday lunch & learn (can be any topic)

Dinner covered if staying late

Budget for anything that will make your life easier or more efficient/pleasant.

The chance to shape the technical foundation of a company building core infrastructure for a $200B+ market

We also offer a $10k referral bonus (after the referred hire finishes a 3 month probation period). Penelope Health is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.