Senior/Staff Applied Scientist, Garner Health
$236-260k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
Data-powered doctor search tool
Open for applications
Data-powered doctor search tool
201-500 employees
Open for applications
$236-260k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
201-500 employees
Company mission
To transform the healthcare economy, delivering high quality and affordable care for all.
Role
Who you are
- 4+ years of industry experience as an Applied Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Research Scientist, or equivalent; or 2+ years of industry experience with a relevant advanced degree, PhDs preferred
- A bias toward action, quickly translating ideas into working prototypes to test approaches
- Strong applied problem-solving skills, with the ability to define good metrics and then deliver solutions that improve them
- Deep technical range, with fluency across Garner's data and a habit of staying current with advances in the field
- Strong judgment in choosing between statistical models, heuristics, optimization approaches, and simpler algorithmic methods depending on the problem
- Strong communication skills and the ability to synthesize complex algorithmic ideas for senior and external stakeholders, and to secure buy-in for cross-team work
- A desire to be a part of a high-performing, mission-driven team that operates with urgency, a strong sense of individual accountability, and a commitment to authentic feedback
What the job involves
- We are seeking an exceptional Senior Applied Scientist to join our Applied Science team. In this role, you will design, develop, and deploy the algorithmic systems that power Garner's products and drive meaningful impact for our members
- 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
- Own the most ambiguous, high-stakes problems on the team end-to-end, and serve as a technical resource others rely on
- 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
- Find novel ways to frame and solve the team's hardest problems, proving out approaches that others build on
- Set the bar for quality by reviewing others' work with rigor, and build the standards and evaluation tooling the team relies on
- 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 near-term roadmap:
- Provider tiering optimization. Build a tiering algorithm that jointly optimizes geographic access and total-cost-of-care savings across our doctor network. The objective function, constraints, and tradeoff surface are all open design questions
- AI primary care doctor. Fine-tune and productionize an LLM-based primary care experience on our website, including the evaluation harness, guardrails, and ongoing quality monitoring needed to ship a medical-adjacent product safely
- Member engagement model. Build an ML system that ingests claims data and in-app behavior to choose the right channel and moment for each touchpoint — SMS, push, phone, or email — to influence member behavior toward better-quality, lower-cost care
- You’ll work on problems that matter, at a company working to change healthcare at scale. You’ll work at the intersection of AI and systemic healthcare reform, where the problems we solve are as interesting and compelling as the mission
- At Garner, you’ll take on real, ambitious problems with real ownership and autonomy, alongside exceptional, principles-based people who genuinely want you to win. It’s demanding by design
- You’ll be challenged to stretch beyond what you thought possible and receive consistent coaching to help you grow and do the best work of your career
- Technologies we use:
- Python, SQL, AWS, Snowflake, pandas, XGBoost, PyTorch, HuggingFace, modern LLM tooling and eval frameworks. We pick tools based on the problem, not the resume — bring your judgment
- This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing company in a transformative role, helping shape the future of healthcare
Our take
An overworked US healthcare system has resulted in long waits and expensive prices, meaning that patients can't access the care that they need. Garner Health creates digital services that allow patients to find a medical expert that fits their specific needs, whatever their insurance circumstances are.
The startup provides an app that analyses local health-insurance claims history through AI. This data is used to recommend local medical professionals that will work with a patient's circumstances whilst providing direct communication channels for liaising. This helps patients to identify the highest-quality doctors and helps doctors improve how they practice medicine.
Despite other companies providing similar bespoke healthcare services, Garner Health shows a cutting edge by partnering with patient employers. This provides the financial incentive that employers must cover all or a portion of medical expenses, making healthcare financially accessible for all involved. The company has good funding at its back, and back in 2022 partnered with Marathon Health towards reducing the inefficiencies of specialty referrals.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
142% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
May 2026
$100m
SERIES E
Feb 2026
$118m
SERIES D
Total funding: $279.3m
Company benefits
- Flexible PTO
- Garner for Garner (employees enrolled in a Garner medical plan gain access to the Garner benefit to find Top Providers and get reimbursed for eligible expenses)
- Hybrid and remote work
- Team meets twice each year to spark innovation and foster belonging
- Variety of social programs beyond work hours
- Equal paid parental leave (12 weeks) following the birth, adoption or placement of a child
- 401(k) plan with a 2% company match and immediate vesting
- Other financial benefits such as Flexible Spending Accounts and mortgage assistance
Company HQ
Flatiron District, New York, NY
Leadership
Nick Reber
(CEO & Founder)Studied Mathematics at Brown before joining Bridgewater Associates as a Senior Investment Associate in 2006. Left Bridgewater in 2016 to join Oscar Health's Leadership Team. Founded Garner in 2018.
Salary benchmarks
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