Engineering at Big Health

In order to scale and bring more value to our customers, psychological safety is key.

At Big Health, our mission is to help millions get back to good mental health with non-drug alternatives for conditions like anxiety and insomnia. Our digital therapeutics deliver meaningful real-world change by providing positive clinical outcomes for individuals and lowering companies’ health care costs. The pandemic has only underscored the importance of mental health, and with our recent $75M Series C, we’re growing faster than ever.

In order to deliver the most value for our customers, we must lead by example and foster a psychologically safe environment. Our goal is to create a culture where everyone on the team feels safe enough to be industrious, make and learn from mistakes along the way, and ask for help when needed. Blameless post-mortems are the norm. This means we actively avoid silos and encourage engineers to have productive conversations and debates to get to higher-quality answers. The curiosity to learn and ability to get along well with others is something we actively look for in interviews.

We’re on a mission to protect our users.

First and foremost, we use safe and tested techniques to make digital therapeutics to help millions of end users improve their mental health. However, we serve multiple partners. Our customers are large employers who offer our programs as mental health benefits. We also work with research partners, who come to us for rich and robust data. Lastly, our own colleagues come to us for creative and empowering tools. We have a duty to deliver our best work with lightning focus on what matters, situational awareness, and an unwavering empathy for all.

Each one of the millions we bring back to good mental health are guided down a path we create, a path that is often challenging. Sometimes it needs to get worse before it gets better. It is our job to protect our users along the way. We’re not just writing software, we’re creating digital therapeutics that have tremendous real-world impact.

Engineers are empowered to make decisions and take ownership.

As a new engineer, you’ll join a cross-functional pod that’s a mix of engineers, designers, product managers, and an engineering manager. Each pod is responsible for their own problem domain and we look for engineers who are willing to define what success looks like for their given goals and ensure it’s achieved. For instance, since we’re building a mental health product, one important metric we look at is time to remission – is the user feeling better afterwards and how can we get them there even faster? Engineers who succeed at Big Health encourage others to share their ideas, actively listen, and roll up their sleeves to dig in on a problem, even when it’s not necessarily in their job description. We’ve had backend engineers look into frontend automation testing and other frontend engineers who led projects from start to finish on the backend. Similarly, we like to hire engineering managers who can moderate and facilitate the best ideas cross-functionally. At the end of the day, while we have specific goals, we’re not here to tell you exactly what and how to build things – we want you to feel a strong sense of start-to-finish ownership for solving problems and moving things forward.

Not only are people experts at what they do – they also want to learn more.

When Peter Hames (co-founder and President) had insomnia, he had trouble getting anything other than medication to help him. However, after reading Dr. Colin Espie’s book on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for insomnia, he realized non-drug alternatives could help not only him but also millions of others. Peter partnered with Dr. Espie and thus Big Health was born.

While we have a lot of brain power here — people have PhDs, come from big name companies, and also smaller startups — the things we all have in common is that we’re driven by the shared mission to effect lasting change in the mental health space with digital therapeutics. “There’s the constant feeling that I’m in good company and trust that everyone is doing what they need to do,” says Jerome Thibaud, our director of engineering.

We’ll never be satisfied with the status quo and are always looking for ways to better ourselves and our product. If that resonates with you, don’t hesitate to reach out!

One of our core engineering values is “Evidence is our North Star.”

At the highest level, the nature of our domain is clinical. Our product is evidence based and backed by industry-leading research and randomized controlled trials. Approximately 10 million people have access to Sleepio and Daylight – our digital therapeutics for insomnia and anxiety. Data informs everything we do as we continue to iterate and improve these offerings for our customers. We build our OKRs based on the data we collect and are constantly looking for ways to improve our DevOps metrics.

We’re doubling down on personal growth.

Engineering managers’ number one priority is to take care of their people, above everything else. This means ensuring direct reports have the resources and the support they need to expand their skills and grow in their careers. We offer a $1,000 professional development stipend that team members can use on everything from online trainings, to books, or conferences, plus five days off paid per year to devote to personal professional development. Moreover, we believe there are multiple ways to grow your career, whether you’d like to level up as an IC or become a people manager. That’s why we’re working on further codifying expectations so that we can tell you exactly what steps you need to take to get where you’d like to be.

From self-organized book clubs, to guilds that align across pods, there are endless ways to learn from and with your peers. We also hold regular demos (where you might find us all wearing fun wigs) to share what we’re working on and host Lunch & Learns. For example, we recently hosted Santiago Papini Ph.D., who spoke about his research on data-driven approaches for personalizing psychological interventions. Specifically, Papini shared how using machine learning models could help find correlations between different mental health conditions such as insomnia and anxiety, with the end goal of figuring out what drivers to act on in order to have the highest impact on alleviating both. Learning more about our domain keeps us excited and motivated.

Over 70% of Big Healthers are remote.

We’ve been remote since 2010, which means we’re experts at setting distributed teams up for success. Whether you prefer more heads-down time in the morning or later in the evening, there’s plenty of flexibility to help you do your best work. Leadership is also very cautious about communication outside of normal working hours (which can get a little tricky sometimes given that we span the US and the UK). However, with Slack and Google apps, you can take advantage of the schedule send feature to send emails within a person’s normal working hours. We invest in maintaining healthy boundaries, for example, through workshops that teach people how to make room for themselves and say no when needed.

Another way we support work/life balance is with our monthly Wellbeing Days. Employees can choose how to spend their day, whether it’s catching up on work, taking the day off, or something in between – without the distraction of email, Slack or meetings. Big Health is also a great place to work for people who are growing their families. In addition to generous parental leave (which you’re eligible for starting day one), we offer an optional flexible return to work program: employees may choose to work a reduced schedule of 10 total hours per week for the first 4 consecutive weeks after returning from new parent leave, at 100% of their normal rate of pay.

We recognize you have passions, hobbies, and other commitments outside of work and want you to enjoy them!

Our success is in large part thanks to our pod structure.

We believe that throughput comes from fostering team autonomy. An essential component of this is to provide the teams with the knowledge and skill sets they need to deliver value to our users. That is why our cross functional teams (aka pods) have members from all functions (Clinical, Engineering, Product, Design, Creative, Regulatory) and their ability to work together is what allows us to win. If this sounds good to you, we encourage you to apply!