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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We hire candidates from all over the world. We offer flexibility over work schedule and location.
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!
As a growth generalist at Anima, you'll operate at the intersection of product, engineering, revenue, and operations, tackling the most urgent problems facing Anima. No two days are the same: one day you might be building an internal tool to automate a complex workflow, the next you’re tackling a high level problem statement from 0→1; starting with first principle thinking and taking it all the way to execution in the solution space.
Here’s a few example problems you may tackle in this role:
Customer Support Automation: “How can we build an automated workflow/agent that minimises both the time to resolution of customer support tickets and the number of manual team hours used for support?”
Optimise Distribution Partnerships: “How do we select and win the optimal basket of distribution partnerships such that we maximise discounted cash flow and minimise the risk of external partners?”
Accelerate Revenue Collection: “How do we minimise the time from contracted ARR to realised revenue collection?”
You'll collaborate closely with product, distribution, and people teams to identify leverage points and build scalable solutions (whether that’s automation powered by LLMs, smarter analytics pipelines, or entirely new internal systems and processes). You’ll need to thrive in ambiguity and execute fast.
Our stack is mature, modern, and built for rapid iteration: fully serverless backend on AWS, JS/TS across the board (Angular, React, Capacitor, Electron), with robust CI/CD and test coverage, as well as no-code tooling such as Retool and Zapier. Generally, the growth team 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.
The pace is fast, the impact is real, and the rate of personal growth across all domains is exciting. You'll be joining a team that values pragmatism, ownership, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
First Month - some examples of what to expect:
Gain comprehensive understanding of Anima’s product, verticals, and user base.
Collaborate with Product, Distribution and People organizations to assess current processes and identify the biggest pain points and opportunities for productivity gain.
Prioritise and implement automated workflows to replace manual processes where feasible.
Next 6 Months - some examples of what to expect:
Lead the design and deployment of scalable automation solutions that are highly usable for internal stakeholders by leaning into your product/people intuition and strong decision making.
Work closely with stakeholders to constantly explore automation projects based on their impact and feasibility, honing in on the 90/10 power law opportunities. Engage in system-building activities.
Example projects include building an agent that automatically updates CRM fields and deal statuses using LLM inference, function calling and retrieval on user transcripts OR building a 'debugging' co-pilot that has global context on the codebase beyond just the open file and endlessly more.
Drive continuous improvement in automation processes, integrating NLP algorithms and data analytics to extract valuable insights.
6+ Months:
Collaborate with the ML/data team to leverage advanced techniques for further enhancing automation and efficiency across the organization.
Potential to transition to a more managerial/executive role. Lead an autonomous lance of elite automation engineers.
A strong T-shaped generalist, with exceptional problem solving and systems thinking ability - able to abstract human and non-human systems into high usability human-in-the-loop automations.
Intellectually curious with a growth mindset - willing and able to tackle entirely novel challenges that lack prior precedent through applying strong CS fundamentals and first principles thinking, creatively using the right data structures & algorithms to solve problems 90/10. A forces of nature who walks through walls to deliver, on anything, even in a fresh domain for problems they’ve never encountered
Strong engineering/quantitative aptitude or willing and able to pick up within 2 months.
Can move across different abstraction levels, thriving in ambiguity: Keen to understand the big picture & entire context of the company with the ability to dive deep in any vertical to solve complex problems; strong stakeholder management skills
Hungry and high energy - A force of nature when empowered with the tools, resources and development.
Open-minded and low ego - Exceptional at ‘breadth-first search’ of problem spaces, and consistently mindful of local maxima. Values pragmatism and open discussion from first principles rather than dogma.
Crewmate mentality - 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). Takes duty to crew and our mission extremely seriously.
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.
