Staff Backend Engineer

Location: Remote, USA

This is primarily a backend role. Truemed has an intentionally small engineering team of staff+ developers, and we plan to keep the team lean as we scale the company. The ideal candidate loves building great software, has personally owned large efforts in several environments, and (bonus points) has some payments experience.

Our engineering team consists of 10 engineers from top companies such as Google, Coinbase, Dropbox, and Amazon. We plan on keeping the team small as we scale, giving each engineer the opportunity to own large efforts. The ideal candidate loves building great user interfaces, has a background working on a strong engineering team, and is knowledgeable of modern frontend technologies and concepts.

Come do the best work of your career and help us transition $150B in healthcare spending towards prevention, before people get sick.

Qualifications

• Staff-level experience on a great engineering team

• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining large projects

• Familiarity with at least 1 backend framework (Django, Rails, etc…)

• US-based

About Truemed

Truemed enables patients to use HSAs/FSAs to buy healthy food, exercise equipment, and supplements. Today, we support brands like Peloton, Eight Sleep, Momentous, and hundreds of other top healthy brands. We're building the infrastructure that allows health and wellness merchants to accept the $150+ billion tied up in HSA and FSA accounts. By allowing consumers to spend these pre-tax dollars on goods that make them healthier, we'll incentivize consumers to invest in their health and begin to reverse the explosion in chronic illness that's plagued the US for the last 50 years.

Compensation

Comp and equity in the top decile for Series A startups. Our goal is to have a small engineering team of highly motivated, founder-minded experts.

Founding team

• Justin Mares has co-founded healthy food brands Kettle & Fire and Perfect Keto (which combined generate over $100 million/year in revenue) and is the co-author of Traction, a leading book on growth marketing.

• Calley Means, who is a health advocate and #1 New York Times best-selling author of Good Energy (about our mission of putting metabolic health at the center of medicine)

Our mission

95% of all medical costs go to people after we are sick. This is so normalized, most don’t realize how insane it is. Few would argue that the purpose of healthcare should be to enable people to be healthy. But this is not how it works. Every institution that impacts our health - from Pharma to hospitals to doctors to insurance - makes money when we are sick and loses money when we are healthy. Health doesn’t happen in a doctor's office. Going to the doctor after you have diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, cancer or any other chronic condition is like going to the mechanic after you’ve crashed a car. We need to prevent the crash in the first place.

There is a tribe that realizes that habits are the basis of health. Not drugs, not doctor’s visits, not surgeries.

Nearly every dollar of health policy should go towards incentivizing these five habits:

1. FOOD: Eating whole, non-contaminated food and NOT eating inflammatory food such as sugar, highly processed grains, and vegetable oils.

2. SLEEP: adequate quantity and quality of sleep.

3. MOVEMENT: Increasing exercise and reducing sedentary behavior

4. STRESS: Reducing chronic stress

5. ENVIRONMENT: Increasing sunlight and minimizing environmental toxins

People who practice these habits rarely get heart disease (#1 cause of death), many leading forms of cancer (#2 cause of death), stroke (#5 cause of death), Alzheimer’s (#7 cause of death), Type 2 Diabetes (#8 cause of death) and liver disease (#10 cause of death). They will be much more likely to recover from pneumonia (#9 cause of death), COVID-19 (#3 cause of death) chronic lower respiratory diseases (#6 cause of death), and suicide (#11 cause of death).

Disease isn’t some random occurrence that might happen in the future – it’s tied to what we do and how we feel today. If you are battling “minor” health issues like fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, pain, infertility or erectile dysfunction, it’s important to realize that the underlying cause of these conditions is generally the same thing that will lead to a “major” illness sometime later in life. But these underlying causes are reversible; you can feel better today and drive down your risk for most major diseases to nearly zero by prioritizing these five habits.

The health situation today is dire, but we are optimistic. Just 120 years ago, starvation, malnutrition and early death were the norm. Tuberculosis and pneumonia were the leading causes of death. Life expectancy in the United States was around 40. Only 10% of Americans made it to age 65. 30 percent of all U.S. deaths occurred in children less than 5 years of age compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999. If you transported someone living in those times to the present day, they’d be in utter shock as they tried to process the advancements society has made.

Yet, we are in the midst of a modern health crisis. The good news is that our system can be fixed and the crisis can end. Throughout prior crucible moments, human ingenuity created advancements and systems changes that few could imagine. The next revolution in health will come from understanding how the root of almost every disease relates to habits.

And habits are driven by incentives.

We need to start seeing food (and exercise, sleep and other healthy habits) as medicine. Over 90% of Americans are battling or at risk for a chronic condition. But drugs and medical interventions don’t cure disease.

There are thousands of peer-reviewed studies that show exercise and healthy food helps reverse and prevent virtually every chronic condition - ranging from diabetes to infertility to depression to heart disease to obesity. Often, food and dietary interventions are better than leading pharmaceuticals or medical procedures.

Doctors can prescribe food and exercise to prevent disease, and we believe more should - and TrueMed will normalize this in the medical and consumer ecosystem.