Staff Applied Scientist

What you’ll be part of

Garner is on a mission to transform the U.S. healthcare system — and we’re the only proven player doing exactly that. We partner with employers to redesign how healthcare works: applying 550+ proprietary clinical metrics across 80+ specialties to a dataset of 320M+ patients to identify the best-performing doctors, then using compelling incentives to steer members to the care that helps them get healthier, faster.

The result is a rare “win win” — better care and lower costs for both members and employers. In just five years, our work has helped over 2.5 million people access higher-quality care and saved $1B in healthcare costs. We recently raised our Series E and have doubled five years running. If you've ever wanted your work to solve a problem that touches every person in this country, this is the opportunity to do exactly that. You'd be joining a team fundamentally reimagining healthcare in the U.S. — and using AI to scale that impact further and faster than anyone else can.

We are seeking an exceptional Staff Applied Scientist to join our Applied Science team. Garner is hiring Applied Scientists to design and ship the algorithmic systems at the core of our product. Our members rely on us to answer hard questions — Which doctor should I see? What will it cost? When should we reach out, and how? — and the quality of those answers is determined by the algorithms behind them.

This is not a dashboards or descriptive-analytics role. You will own production systems end-to-end: framing the problem, defining the objective function, choosing the right approach (ML, optimization, heuristics, expert systems, or a hybrid), shipping it, and improving it against real-world outcomes. The closest analog outside healthcare is a quantitative researcher at a top hedge fund.

This is a player-coach role. You will be a hands-on-keys Applied Scientist, while also leading a small team that helps you deliver on your roadmap. Your time will be split between your own technical work and working with your team to shape how they approach their problems. This role is a good fit for someone who wants to develop their management toolkit while continuing to work closely on their own technical work, and it can lead either towards management or a deeper senior IC track.

This role will be based in our New York City office (in the Financial District). You must be willing to work in the office 3 days per week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

• Own the most ambiguous, high-stakes problems facing the company end-to-end, and set how the team frames and approaches them

• Frame messy, real-world healthcare and business constraints into clear objectives, tradeoffs, and decision frameworks

• Define the set of metrics needed to judge whether a solution is working, and validate solutions before they ship

• Choose the right approach for each problem, from machine learning to optimization to heuristics to simple rules, based on what the problem actually calls for, and set the standard for how the team selects and applies these approaches

• Deliver algorithmic breakthroughs that move the company's most important metrics, pioneering approaches that become how applied science is done at Garner

• Lead a small team — set their technical direction, unblock them when they're stuck, and share accountability for their growth and the quality of what they ship

• Review Applied Science work at the highest level across the company, ensuring the methods used across teams are sound and correctly applied

• Build a deep understanding of the healthcare economy and Garner's place in it

To make the role concrete, here are three problems on our