Head of Product & Operations

San Francisco, CA

Operations

In office

Full-time

Own how the company runs and how the product gets built. They're the same job here.

Why This Exists

A federal arbitration system called Independent Dispute Resolution, or IDR, now determines billions of dollars in healthcare payments each year. Providers win the vast majority of disputes, yet most eligible claims are never filed. The process is manual, fragmented, and resource-intensive, and most providers don't have the infrastructure to pursue what they're owed.

The No Surprises Act created the framework, and the market already exists. Today it runs on spreadsheets, consultants, and static playbooks. We're building the first intelligent system designed to operate inside it.

Right now the founder holds product direction and the operating cadence. That works at this size and it won't much longer. This role takes both.

Why This Is Hard (and Interesting)

At most companies, product and operations are separate functions that negotiate with each other. Here they're the same loop, and splitting them would break it.

The person running a claim finds the edge case. The edge case becomes a spec. The spec becomes a feature. The feature changes how the claim runs. If those are different people with different incentives, the loop slows down and the company loses its main advantage.

So you'd own both sides. You'd be close enough to the claims to know what actually breaks, and senior enough to decide what we build about it.

The other hard part is that you're taking scope from a founder who has been holding it. That requires someone comfortable with a genuine handover: earning the context fast, then having real opinions that sometimes contradict his.

Who We Are

Recourse is being built in partnership with 25M Health, a healthtech venture firm. We have institutional backing, a shared platform team spanning engineering, strategy, design, and back-office, and early access to large provider systems.

We are actively filing disputes for real customers, including a large multi-facility health system and a litigation-finance partner with hundreds of millions in claim value. This is a funded, validated opportunity with real customers and real data.

We are a small, nimble team. We move quickly and we value clarity over theater. We want this to be the best work of your career. The stretch you look back on as the one where you shipped real things, with people who raised your game, on something that mattered.

We care about clear thinking, high ownership, intellectual honesty, and direct communication. We believe operations, product, and engineering should operate as one pod, not three functions. We want the machines to do machine work, and the humans to do their best work.

The Role

You’ll report to the CEO and own the operating layer of the company. You will:

Own the product roadmap and the calls about what we build next and why
Own the operating cadence: goals, weekly rhythm, throughput and quality metrics, what gets tracked and what gets ignored
Run the loop between claims operations and engineering, so real-world friction becomes shipped product quickly
Write specs that get built against. Not requirements documents, specs
Own customer launches end to end, starting with expanding our anchor health system across facilities and service lines
Build and grow the operations team as volume increases
Push the automation rate. Every claim handled manually is a claim the system should have handled
Be a genuine second voice on strategy, not an executor of someone else's

Who You Are

You've built something before. Ideally you've founded a company, been early at one, or owned a P&L. You know what it feels like when nobody is coming to tell you what to do.

You are AI-pilled. You’ve used AI tools to do work that would have taken a team. You have opinions about which ones are useful and which are hype. You stay current because the world is changing and you want to see the next shift before anyone else.

You have strong operational common sense. You can walk into a messy process, figure out what actually matters, and produce a clean system. You're not precious about methodology. The goal is throughput and quality, not frameworks.

You have technical fluency. You're comfortable with data, you can query systems directly, and you can get hands on to move work forward rather than waiting for engineering cycles. You don't need to be a senior engineer. You do need to collaborate with engineers as a peer.

You have a bias to action. You don't default to no. Speed of iteration over polish of iteration. You start, you learn, you fix things in motion. Most decisions are reversible and do not need extensive study.

You are intellectually honest and curious. You seek out the things that might disconfirm your beliefs. When you don't understand something, you keep digging. When you're wrong, you say so. You use plain language. You respectfully challenge decisions you disagree with, and once a decision is made, you commit.

You put the team first. You are reliable and fully invested. You know sustainable intensity beats burnout. You take your vacations. You check on your teammates. You build a culture where people do their best work because they are supported, not squeezed.

What You Bring

6+ years spanning product and operations, or a founder background where you did both because someone had to
A track record of designing and running workflows at scale, not just documenting them
Meaningful technical fluency: comfort with data, analytical tools, and getting hands on
Deep familiarity with AI tooling. You have shipped things using it, not just demoed it
Experience writing product specs that engineers actually build against
Comfort being customer-facing. You'll be in front of health system executives
A preference for small teams and early-stage chaos over mature org charts

Strong plus, not required: healthcare revenue cycle, claims operations, or exposure to the No Surprises Act and IDR. Experience in regulated environments where correctness and financial impact are tightly coupled is highly valued.

Sound judgment, operational depth, and ownership mindset are required. Grit matters more than pedigree.

Why This Role

This is the closest thing to a co-founder seat that isn't one. You'd own the operating layer of a company with real revenue, real customers, and a market that's growing whether we participate or not.

You'd also have unusual range. Product strategy on Monday, a broken claim on Tuesday, a customer executive on Wednesday, a hiring decision on Thursday. If you like being narrow, you'd hate this. If the last few years have made you want more surface area rather than less, this is it.

If you want this to be the most memorable stretch of your career, where you shipped something real, with a team you respected, in a domain that actually matters, this is the seat.

Equal Opportunity

Recourse is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We believe the best teams are built from people with different backgrounds and perspectives, and we're committed to creating an environment where everyone can do their best work.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $150,000 – $200,000 per year.

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