anima
I quit medicine because I kept watching patients die needlessly, for avoidable reasons. In almost every case, the science and the clinicians were fine. It was the system around them that failed: the way information moved, the way decisions got routed, and the way fragmented teams and fragmented data turned solvable problems into tragedy. Our mission is human wellbeing, and we're focusing on the breakthrough technology of personalised medicine. Since the beginning, our proprietary insight has always been that the company to create a true active learning data engine with a loss function against human wellbeing would be the one to crack it, becoming one of the most impactful companies in the world as a result. We're now in 1,100+ clinics, across 4 product lines, serve >20% of the UK population, and have solved >5.7 million patient cases in the past 12 months alone, saving an estimated 8,600 lives. We are cash flow positive, growing fast, and have a tight crew of ~35 people. Multiple trillion-dollar companies will be built in healthcare over the next two decades, and we intend to be one of them. We have a knights of the round table culture with a flat hierarchy, where we empower builders to have outsized impact on millions of lives, and where we collaboratively converge on the optimal action without dogma or ego. We're all here to serve a greater mission than ourselves. The closest analogy for our culture is probably Firefly (the TV series): a small crew on a ship at the frontier, each person exceptional in a specific way, deeply loyal to each other and the mission, resourceful under constraints, and having a genuinely good time doing something that matters. We're carefully curated, lean, and wholeheartedly in. If you want your skills to be at the highest possible stakes, you belong at Anima. Your work here will save lives. - Shun Long before the "vertical AI" craze, we were obsessed with active reinforcement learning—a niche field in 2021 that the world, pre-ChatGPT, largely ignored. Our trajectory has been unwavering since our YC application: achieving the "holy grail" of personalized medicine and deep phenotyping. This is powered by our proprietary active learning architecture - a system we codified in a 2021 patent that anticipated the Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) and active learning loops now foundational to modern LLMs. While others are just arriving at the party, we’ve spent years executing a plan to build what is now one of the world’s largest, highest-quality labeled datasets. We’re looking for someone who - Has a track record of relentless shipping. - Has proven ability to navigate ambiguity and tackle novel technical challenges from conception to production. - Has strong CS Fundamentals. A deep understanding of data structures, algorithms (e.g., breadth-first search), and first-principles thinking to solve complex product problems. - Is expert-level in TypeScript (TS). Proficiency in building type-safe, scalable applications. You are a full-stack expert in the JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem with a pragmatic approach to tech debt and tool selection. - Has hands-on expertise with React, Angular, or Node.js, with the ability to move between frontend and backend as needed. - Has experience architecting on AWS (specifically Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, and CloudFormation) or a proven "hungry to learn" mindset regarding serverless infrastructure. - Is disciplined towards best practice version control, CI/CD and code extensibility. Values interface safety through dimensionality reduction at interfaces. - Is obsessive about UX and optimises for this over arbitrary technical goals. - Is driven, impatient to grow and wants their shot to change the world. We hire at all levels: our team has new grads and product leaders with 20 years experience. What to expect in the role - You’ll work with an incredibly smart team. Like Michael who built a working CPU from logic dates at age 16 and co-founded YC-backed Embark Trucks, the first self-driving vehicle on Canadian roads. Or Souradip, who built an acoustic fall detector using on-device deep learning; he’s also an MB/PhD from Cambridge who’s published in top medical journals. - You’ll own your projects end to end and ship fast. Like Alex who built ‘Slack for medical teams’ supporting 1000s of channels per organisation and a real time single source of truth for patient data in 4 weeks. Or Dennis who built and shipped a lightning fast cloud document library for clinics in a few days with <100ms traversals through preloading. - You’ll work on a well-established stack that’s already highly scalable, cost effective, secure and performant with minimal to zero ops. - You’ll learn new technologies; whatever is needed to solve the problem. 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. Our current stack We have 2 separate fully functional web apps in prod: one for clinical users and one for patients. Angular, React and Electron, Mixpanel/Posthog for analytics, a fully serverless backend in AWS (Cognito, Appsync GraphQL, Lambda, DynamoDB). We have good functional & unit test coverage and CI/CD.