Design Engineer

Anima saves lives every day

Hey! Shun here, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Anima. We’re building an active learning OS for all of healthcare and life sciences towards maximising human wellbeing globally.

My entire life, I’ve been pulling on a thread that’s affected all of us in some way. Millions die every year because their medical problems aren’t treated quickly enough. Hundreds of millions suffer pain, worry and discomfort needlessly because of long waiting times. I trained as a doctor and quit out of frustration at seeing countless cases of people dying because they got misdiagnosed or didn’t get the right care plan. In one devastating incident, the healthcare system had simply forgotten to follow up about abnormal test results.

Pulling the thread led me to the health spending team at HM Treasury, responsible for deploying 100s billions into the NHS - there, I worked on workforce and system reform policy with No.10 and NHS England (most notably on forming statutory ‘integrated care systems’, which was signed into law as part of the Health and Social Care Act). Seeing the problem space at all abstraction levels convinced me that the only way to fix healthcare was to build a ‘Care Enablement’ platform that can automate and abstract away work at the clinic, and 10x doctors. Doing so would also be the path to a superhuman personalised medicine agent that could go well beyond humans, crunching tens of thousands of low level features at genome and transcriptome level.

At Anima, you’ll help us extend the 3 existing product lines we have, that millions of patients use, and build out new ones at the very cutting edge of healthcare reinforcement learning and agentic AI. Your work will save countless lives.

Top 1% growth - we grew 450% in 2024, are cash flow positive and at Series B/C metrics with a team of ~20

I won’t write too much here, because I think the metrics speak for themselves and if we get further along the process, we can always discuss it more. Users love our product. The biggest testament to this is that most of our growth comes from virality and referrals.

As one of the standout companies in YC’s W21 batch, we raised $2.5M before Demo Day in just 4 days, led by Hummingbird. In early 2024, we closed an oversubscribed Series A round of $12M, led by Molten Ventures. We’ve been turning down pre-emptive offers of more capital since 2024.

Anima clinics look after 3 million lives, and every day around 20,000 people get care through Anima, growing fast.

Why you might love working here

Since the beginning, we’ve cultivated a unique hacker culture at Anima with a flat hierarchy. If you look at some of our LinkedIn profiles, you’ll note that the title is often ‘Product at Anima’, which is a more accurate description of what your role will be - it’s much broader than the typical SWE role. We predict that small, killer T-shaped teams will win out over large mediocre ones in the era of agentic AI. We've been purposefully building a 'knights of the round table' where each person has an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy and human impact on saving lives - zero line managers, PMs or EMs, but an intensive focus on coaching and teaching. [In case you’ve seen the show, the best analogy is Firefly and the crew from it. Greatest show ever imo.]

It started with me. I self taught and wrote a lot of the Anima 1.0 code, and Anima’s active learning patent. I run most of the hiring tech chats to this day. I first and foremost see myself as an IC and builder, and still build stuff in my spare time. More than 80% of our product team are VPs, ex-technical founders and former CTOs (we do not have titles internally). We also have domain experts, including full-stack clinical engineers: ex-MDs who left established medical careers to join Anima because they recognised the much higher leverage they’d have here.

Almost everyone in Anima is at least somewhat technical and very UX focused. This makes for a truly flat hierarchy. Internally, people have described it as a hive mind - there is little semantic error because we all deeply understand the problem, engineering, grading for potential features, and trade-offs.

It's reflected in how we operate:

1. With the outlier product talent density at Anima, there's a heavy focus on coaching and teaching, with no need for line management.

   We've been able to make huge strides in the NHS because we all deeply understand the problem, grading tasks based on our engineering expertise, and real life clinical trade-offs. This deep domain knowledge is ultimately how we integrated with the major electronic health records (EMIS and SystmOne) in just 4 months, and grew from $150k to $7m in 20 months and 3 product lines.

2. We're relentlessly resourceful. In 14 months, we built an extremely loved enterprise app that users have said 'seems too good to be true'. Anima can take an information complete medical history as good or better than a typical human doctor, and increasingly automates front and back office in a way that would’ve seemed like science fiction a few years ago - for example, Annie (our AI) now deals with a large percentage of documents completely autonomously without a human in the loop.

3. Anima is a safe haven for free thinkers and we've been careful to build a culture where everyone feels comfortable being their complete unfiltered self, sharing their honest thoughts, feelings without ever needing to self-censor. Joining Anima means joining a crew with exceptional talent density, and your crewmates will never let you down.

4. We hire talented people who think from first principles and have high growth potential - great decision makers who deserve to have complete autonomy and are forces of nature when empowered with it. Decisions are never made in isolation by the founders. All information is transparently available to the whole team on our Notion - every meeting, decision, success, failure. We have a live Retool dashboard which shows live MRR, linked to Stripe invoices.

5. We are deeply collaborative, and through mutual and self-challenge, we converge towards the optimum, and decisively execute. We are united by child-like intellectual curiosity and experiment and wander freely when the right path isn’t clear. We believe all future managers should be formidable individual contributors & domain experts.

6. We hire candidates from all over the world. We offer flexibility over work schedule and location.

7. We have a good time! We get the whole team together at least twice a year for team retreats, with the last ones in Brittany (France), La Paz (Mexico), Tuscany (Italy), Dominican Republic!

Join a design-led company where incredible UX is at the core of every line of code, and everything we do

Great design is built our DNA: Rachel, co-founder and COO, heads the design of all our products. Our thesis is that code serves UX - ideally proprietary UX that users are willing to pay a lot for. We care a lot - we always build clear UX directed graphs (sometimes called user flows) and Figma mockups before beginning architecting or writing a single line of code. We close the loop by using our UX DiGraphs as E2E testing models. We care so much that all our engineers chose to become proficient in Figma :)

We’re looking for visionary leaders and architects who can think from first principles and have high growth potential.

The quickest way to get your creations into the hands of users

When everyone is UX obsessed, it’s much easier to stay on the same page & execute rapidly. This means we have a super short latency from ideation to real usage - here are two recent examples:

• Rachel, co-founder and currently leading design, talked to power users and discovered a critical need for multiple organisations to able to join the same real time multiplayer dashboard. She mocked up a new dashboard in Figma with our engineers, getting async feedback from power users throughout (our users are generally very fanatical and helpful!), and we got it shipped within 5 days!

• Alex (Clinical Engineer), realised that there was a need for care teams to communicate internally and with outside collaborators, and helped Rachel create UX flows and mockups for a game changing feature where virtual care teams could discuss cases and see a single source of truth for the patient history. We managed to get it shipped in 4 weeks!

Does this sound like you?

Note: You are a rockstar frontend engineer foremost, who has an especially strong grasp of product intuition, UX and Design.

• Hungry and wants their shot to change the world - a force of nature when empowered with the tools, resources and development to do it.

• Bored and frustrated at big companies; feel held back by red tape, bureaucracy and poor decisions.

• Keen to understand the big picture & entire context of the company and vertical; has a sense of urgency for growth towards a senior executive role.

• Have hacked together a cool project in the past, that did something useful, and want to relive that feeling of accomplishment (everyday!).

• High sigma product intuition and empathy - an uncanny ability to intuit the deepest anxieties and opportunities for user joy even with minimal user research.

• Obsessed with optimising UX: quickly able to understand the needs of our users and translate deep anxieties and latent opportunities for excitement and joy into optimal UX flows.

• Exceptional attention to detail & an eye for aesthetics that ensure a careful & thorough approach to Figma mockups.

• An excellent communicator: concisely and clearly communicate designs to the team both verbally and through the materials you produce (sketches, wireframes, prototypes etc.)

• Able to understand and distil complex concepts & processes and make them accessible for our users in the form of simple, elegant user flows and interactions.

• Able to work in an iterative design process, guided by user feedback & company goals; motivated and energised by group critique.

• Seeks to maximise not only self productivity, but combined team productivity, communicating the right things at the right time through the right channels (verbal/Slack/Notion).

• Intellectually curious and loves learning - able to tackle entirely novel challenges that lack prior precedent through applying strong design fundamentals and first principles thinking, creatively using the best tools for the job to maximise user delight.

• Familiarity with Figma and/or hungry to learn.

We don’t enforce any particular experience level, but you’ll need to demonstrate most of the above through past projects and/or our assessment process.

Our current stack & what to expect from the role

Here is some information on our technical stack in case you are interested (this may not make much sense to you - that's okay!): we are tech agonistic, and collectively choose the best tools for the job. We’re constantly looking to maximise our productivity and minimise what we call “discounted dev time cost” for shipping features. We have 2 separate fully functional web apps in prod: one for clinical users and one for patients. We have good functional & unit test coverage and we recently implemented an advanced CI/CD pipeline which supports golden screenshots and automated frontend tests. We primarily use Figma for our mock-ups & wireframes.

We’re looking to add talented product designers who are hungry and understand the urgency and importance of what we’re doing for society.

First month - some examples of what to expect:

• Work with our engineers and sales team to identify, create and implement the user flows that make using Anima a delight for both doctors and patients.

• Design and implement creative solutions that improve the clarity and comprehension of our 2 apps, and our website.

• Join customer calls to develop a deep understanding of their fundamental motivations and needs/pain points.

Next 6 months - some examples of what to expect:

• Lead on the design and implementation for our flagship features, including building out our video consultation offering & seamlessly incorporating integrations with NHS APIs into our UX.

• Collaborate with engineers to apply insights from user cohort & A/B testing to inform decisions about feature selection & design.

• Hire/scale the team, while implementing the right processes at the right times to maximise discounted team productivity and maximise user delight.

6+ months - some examples of what to expect:

• Potential to transition to a more managerial/executive role.

• Define and formalise our design standards, and grow and scale our design tools and processes so we keep rapidly shipping features that result in a high retention delta.