VP of Engineering

CancerNavigator is a healthcare startup dedicated to supporting cancer patients in their hour of need. 

Our Mission & Our Work, in Brief

Cancer is the number one cause of death for commercially insured Americans and the top cost driver for health plans. And, cancer patients are struggling.

CancerNavigator is a white-glove, end-to-end, cancer support service for patients and their families. We work with health plans across the country to provide 1-1 support to members facing a cancer diagnosis. Our support is delivered through dedicated Oncology Certified Nurses, who help members get to fantastic experts for their care and help them through the thousands of other problems that arise across the cancer journey.

Join us to serve cancer patients in their hour of need.

The “VP of Engineering” Role

Role and Team:

As VP of Engineering, you’ll join CancerNavigator at a pivotal stage of growth and have the opportunity to shape what our engineering function becomes. Reporting directly to the CEO, you’ll initially operate as a highly hands-on technical leader—setting the technical strategy, defining the roadmap, and building alongside the team. Over time, you’ll take on leadership of our existing technical resources and build out the engineering organization needed to support our next stage of scale.

This is not a role where you’ll inherit a mature engineering organization or a predefined roadmap. You’ll work closely with leaders across the business to understand how our service operates today, identify the highest-impact opportunities for technology, and determine what we should build, buy, automate, or redesign.

Daily Work:

This is a highly entrepreneurial, hands-on leadership role. You’ll have significant autonomy to shape both what we build and how engineering operates at CancerNavigator. You will:

• Partner with our CEO and functional leaders to set the technical strategy and roadmap for the business.
• Identify the highest-impact opportunities to use technology and AI to help our team serve more patients at scale.
• Design and build foundational systems, particularly in the early stages of the role.
• Lead the development of tools across patient navigation, communication, research, and healthcare data processing.
• Grow and lead our engineering function, establishing the team, infrastructure, and practices we’ll need for our next stage of growth.

The Requirements

• Engineering leadership experience, ideally in a VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or similar role within a health tech company.
• Strong experience building technology in healthcare, with a deep understanding of HIPAA and the security, privacy, and data considerations that come with handling sensitive health information.
• A track record of taking complex technical problems from strategy through architecture and hands-on execution.
• Experience building and scaling technology for a tech-enabled service or other operationally complex business.
• Experience with modern data infrastructure and cloud-based systems, with familiarity in Python and SQL.
• Experience applying AI to automate back-end workflows, augment human operations, and build real-world products.
• An entrepreneurial, hands-on approach—you’re comfortable setting the strategy, operating with ambiguity, and rolling up your sleeves to build.

Strongly preferred: Experience working with medical claims, prior authorization, or other complex healthcare data.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock option package
• Performance-based incentive compensation
• Remote-first work; live where you want within the U.S.
• All-company on-sites 2-3 times per year
• Medical and Dental Insurance (80% employer paid), Vision Insurance (100% employer paid)
• Healthcare and Dependent Care FSA
• Group Life and AD&D Insurance (involuntary with the option to buy-up coverage)
• Unlimited PTO

Our Culture & Values, In Brief

We’re building a company where what we do matters. The goal couldn’t be clearer – serve cancer patients. As the business grows, and the work becomes more complex, we need to become more, not less, committed to why we are doing this.

We have three company values, which guide our company:

1. Patients first, always: In everything we do, we put the cancer patient (and their families) first; we exist to serve them in their most urgent moments.
2. Respect for our responsibility: We strive, as a team, to respect the gravity of the responsibility we bear to patients, always acting and producing in a way that is worthy of the trust they have placed in us.
3. Kindness to and respect for others: We treat our teammates well, no exceptions. We are one team.

At CancerNavigator, we believe a well-rounded and diverse team is a key to our success. We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status.