Strategic Business Operations Lead

Develop Health; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Flexible PTO

AI tooling budget and high-end worksta

Job summary

Develop Health is seeking a Strategic Business Operations Lead in Menlo Park to ensure new strategic accounts run smoothly and efficiently. You’ll manage benefit verification and prior authorization workflows, build repeatable processes, and drive automation ideas with product and engineering.

You’ll report to the Head of Pharmacy Operations, shape the operating playbook, and partner with BPOs to keep queues healthy and metrics transparent.

Qualifications

• 2–4 years in operations, ideally in healthcare, health tech, or SaaS.
• Composure under pressure and ability to handle high-stakes work.
• Strong analytical instincts; can pull data and build dashboards.
• Root-cause mindset; fix the system, not just the symptom.
• Comfort with ambiguity; build processes where none exist.

Responsibilities

• Run complex benefit verification and prior authorization cases and untangle them.
• Find workflow bottlenecks, payer/PBM issues, and process gaps.
• Write workflow docs, playbooks, and repeatable processes.
• Feed product and engineering with detailed customer pain points.
• Level up the team with training materials and knowledge resources.
• Support BPO partnerships and manage outsourcing relationships.
• Plan capacity, forecast volume, and onboard new team members.
• Build operational dashboards and performance analytics.
• Keep the queue healthy by balancing demand and capacity.
• Turn frontline patterns into product/process improvements.

Skills

Operations experience

Analytical dashboards

Root-cause analysis

Composure under pressure

Ambiguity tolerance

Tools

BI platforms

BI reporting tools

Job description

Develop Health is on a mission to use AI to radically accelerate access to life-saving medications. By automating complex, manual healthcare processes—like benefit verification and prior authorization— we've been growing rapidly and over the past couple of years have helped over 2.5 million patients!

We’re partnering with some of the largest pharmacy benefit managers and payers in the nation, revolutionizing how healthcare interactions occur by eliminating human delays and inefficiencies. Our small, elite team of founders and engineers have previously launched and exited successful healthcare startups including Rupa Health and Canvas Medical. We are now scaling rapidly following a major funding round.

About The Role

We're hiring a Strategic Business Operations Lead to make sure every new strategic account actually runs well once it's signed.

A new payer or PBM partnership goes live and a dozen operational questions come with it. Who works the queue. What the SLA is. Which cases need a human and which the product should handle. What "good" looks like in the numbers. You'll be the person who answers those questions, then builds the systems so nobody has to ask them again.

Day to day that means working real benefit verification and prior authorization cases, finding where workflows break, and turning each fix into a documented process the team can run without you. You'll also help manage our BPO partners, keep the daily queue moving, and build the dashboards leadership uses to see how operations are performing.

The unusual part: our product is the automation. A lot of this job is spotting work our AI should be doing and getting it in front of product and engineering with enough detail to build.

You'll report to our Head of Pharmacy Operations and PBM Relations. Much of our operational playbook is still being written, so you'll have a lot of latitude and a lot of blank pages.

What You’ll Do — Impact In Your First 3–6 Months

• Run the work. Take on complex benefit verification and prior authorization cases and become the person the team trusts to untangle them.

• Find and fix what's broken. Track down workflow bottlenecks, payer and PBM issues, and process gaps that slow the team down or frustrate customers.

• Write things down. Turn what you learn into workflow docs, playbooks, and repeatable processes that hold up as volume grows.

• Feed product and engineering. Bring customer pain points back with enough specificity to prioritize, and flag where automation could replace manual work.

• Level up the team. Build the training materials and knowledge resources that cut escalations.

What You’ll Own — Driving Growth Beyond 6 Months

• Support our BPO partnerships. Be the day-to-day contact for our outsourcing partners, hold them to quality standards, and drive improvements in service delivery.

• Help plan capacity. Forecast volume, flag coverage gaps across time zones, and help onboard new team members as we hire.

• Build the reporting. Own the operational metrics, SLA dashboards, and performance analytics that leadership uses to make decisions.

• Keep the queue healthy. Balance incoming demand against team capacity so wait times stay low and SLAs hold as we scale.

• Turn insight into leverage. Convert frontline patterns into product and process changes that cut support volume and improve unit economics.

What You’ll Bring On Day 1

• 2–4 years in operations, ideally in healthcare, health tech, or SaaS.

• Composure under pressure. You've handled complex, high-stakes work and can keep everyone calm through it.

• Strong analytical instincts. You pull your own data and build your own dashboards and reports.

• A root-cause habit. You investigate, spot patterns, and fix the system rather than the symptom.

• Comfort with ambiguity. You've worked somewhere the process didn't exist yet, and you built it.

What You’ll Need To Learn Quickly

• Our domain and product: how our workflows and automation layer map onto real payer, PBM, and provider processes, and where the product creates leverage.

• How we operate: our escalation paths and engineering workflows, and how to raise an issue so it gets resolved fast.

• Payer nuance: how different payers interpret prior authorization and benefit verification requirements, and what those differences mean for customers.

Bonus Points

• Hands-on experience with pharmacy benefit prior authorization or benefit verification on the payer or PBM side.

• A strong grasp of the patient access journey from prescription to dispensing, including where payers create friction.

• You've built support processes, documentation, or training from scratch before.

• Familiarity with AI tooling, BPO workforce management software, or BI and reporting platforms.

This Might Not Be The Right Fit If

• You want to manage a team on day one. This role builds the systems and runs the work. People management may come as we scale, but it isn't the job today.

• You'd rather stay out of the queue. Your credibility here comes from working real cases yourself, not from reviewing someone else's summary of them.

• You want a playbook. Most of ours is still unwritten, and writing it is a large part of the role.

• You want to hand the analysis to someone else. You'll build your own dashboards and pull your own data.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary plus meaningful early-stage equity.

• Health, dental, and vision coverage, and flexible PTO.

• High-end workstation and AI tooling budget.

• Work that makes medication access dramatically faster for hundreds of thousands of patients a month, with room to grow as the operations function scales.

If you're passionate about building meaningful technology in healthcare, we'd love to hear from you.