Head of Research [NYC or SF]

About Concurrence

At Concurrence, we're building the clinical AI infrastructure that health systems, life sciences companies, payors, and government agencies run their patient-facing care on. Our agents work across the whole patient journey: pre-visit intake, care navigation, post-visit care plans, and ongoing monitoring. Our mission is to make excellent care accessible to every patient, not rationed by the limits of clinician time.

This hasn’t been solved because the underlying record was never built for it. EHRs were designed for billing, not for systems that learn. So instead of layering another point solution on top, we’re rebuilding the medical record as a timeline of clinical events and running agents on top of it that improve with every patient interaction. Unlike single-purpose chatbots or scribes, Concurrence is the platform our customers use to build their own agents. That means our work has to hold up across specialties, workflows, and regulatory environments and not just one narrow use case.

Our agents have supported more than 10 million patient encounters and are on track to grow tenfold this year. Our work is validated through partnerships with leading academic medical institutions. We’re fresh off our Series A, backed by Tier 1 VCs such as Madrona, General Catalyst, and Optum Ventures.

We’re a small team of around 35 people, working in person in New York City and San Francisco. We care deeply about craft, clinical rigor, and the speed at which good ideas reach patients. If you want your work to be measured in outcomes rather than releases, we’d like to hear from you.

About this role

Clinical AI is only worth deploying if someone can demonstrate that it works. Our agents have supported millions of patient encounters, which means we’re held to a clinical standard and trust is earned from clinicians, regulators, and academic reviewers. As Head of Research, you’ll own that case.

You’ll build Concurrence’s research function from the ground up: hiring researchers, setting the agenda alongside our CTO, and owning how our systems are evaluated. That includes benchmarks, patient simulation, diagnostic reasoning evaluation, and the studies that show a clinical agent behaves appropriately in the settings where it is actually deployed. You’ll also own how this work reaches the outside world through publications, academic collaborations, and the regulatory and policy conversations that follow.

Research sits unusually close to the product here. We deploy into live health systems, so findings are expected to change what we ship and the standards you set determine what’s allowed in front of patients. You’ll work directly with the clinicians on our team so the research reflects how medicine is practiced, not just how it appears in a dataset.

This role blends scientific leadership with organizational judgment. You’ll be building a function, not joining one, while representing Concurrence’s technical credibility externally. The ideal candidate brings deep research expertise, the operational discipline to run programs to completion (and stop them when appropriate), and the communication skills to make rigorous work legible to clinical and regulatory audiences.

What you'll do

Build and lead the research team by hiring researchers and setting the research agenda with our CTO

Own how we evaluate clinical agents, including benchmarks, patient simulation, diagnostic reasoning evaluation, and the standards a system must meet before it reaches a patient

Design and run studies that hold up to clinical scrutiny, and decide which programs continue and which should stop

Publish, and turn our existing academic partnerships into substantive collaborations rather than logos

Represent Concurrence’s research externally to clinicians, regulators, academic partners, and the wider research community

Own how we describe what our systems can and cannot do, including limitations, with the judgment that regulated communication requires

Work directly with the clinicians on our team so evaluation reflects real clinical practice

Translate findings into product decisions, working with engineering and the deployment teams so research changes what we ship

What we're looking for

A track record of running research programs—not just contributing to them. You have owned scope, people, timelines, and the decision to stop

A background in AI for health at a research lab or an equivalent setting. Work on systems like Google DeepMind's AMIE, or leading health research efforts at a major lab, is the shape we have in mind

A public record of rigorous work: publications, evaluation studies, benchmarks, or systems other researchers use

Fluency in clinical evaluation, including study design, what counts as evidence in medicine, and why a benchmark result is not a clinical claim

Experience hiring and developing researchers, and building the practices a research function runs on

Comfort in policy and regulatory conversations, and the judgment to communicate limitations clearly

Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make technical work credible to clinical and non-technical audiences

A strong sense of ownership, and the willingness to build the function rather than inherit it

Nice to have

Clinical training. Practising or former clinicians who moved into research are very welcome

Experience with regulatory submissions, clinical trials, or evidence generation for a regulated product

Experience evaluating agentic or multi-step LLM systems rather than single-turn models

Existing relationships across academic medicine or health policy

Benefits (available to Full-Time Employees)

Health & Wellness

Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance

Daily catered lunch and dinner

Mental health support and wellness coaching

Flexible wellness stipend for fitness, therapy, or personal growth

Growth & Development

Annual learning budget for courses, books, or conferences

Conference attendance budget for professional development

Annual team offsite

Academic collaboration opportunities

Unlimited PTO

Our Core Values

Patients Win, We Win

If patients aren't getting better care, we haven't earned the right to scale. Every internal decision gets pressure-tested: does this make patients' lives better? If we can't draw the line, we question why we're doing it.

High Standards, High Care

We hold a high bar for the team because patients are counting on us to get this right. But high standards only work with genuine investment in each other. You can take risks, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas—not despite our standards, but because of them.

Thoughtful Urgency

We move fast by default, but speed without judgment is recklessness. The discipline is knowing which decisions are reversible vs. not. In healthcare AI, the companies that win will be fast everywhere they can be and careful everywhere they must be. We build the muscle to do both.

Intensely Measured

We instrument patient outcomes, provider ROI, system performance, and clinical accuracy. But data without action is surveillance. Every metric should h