---
title: 'Principal Engineer at Vitalize'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-engineer-vitalize-san-francisco-jv4wadgac7d3'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Principal Engineer at Vitalize

- **Company:** Vitalize
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $195k–$275k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vitalize/24dd24f6-df3a-4f7a-85bf-2e900f414d9a

## Job description

## OUR VISION: UNLOCK HEALTHCARE’S FULL CAPACITY

Hospitals run on three things: their people, their beds, and their supplies… and all are still managed with spreadsheets, phone calls, and gut instinct. Vitalize is building the system that runs it all intelligently, starting with labor — the biggest cost (nearly 60% of a hospital’s P&L) and the hardest operational problem.

We’re building the labor and capacity operating system for health systems — forecasting demand, matching the right staff to it automatically, and coordinating patients across the hospital.

The impact is real: we save hospitals millions in unnecessary labor spend, give clinical leaders back 10–20 hours every week, and are often the reason staff and leaders stay. This isn’t a nice-to-have: our customers pay 5–15× more than legacy incumbents because Vitalize is mission-critical software their hospitals rely on every single minute.

We’ve raised over $32M from top investors, and even our own customers.

## COMPANY VALUES — WHAT WE LOOK FOR

We hire and grow everyone against the same four values. Each one comes from a real Vitalize story—interview with us to hear them.

- 🚗 Push the Car. Step in regardless of role. We help wherever we’re needed, own problems end to end, and don’t stay in our lane.
- 🏥 Premier 1K. We show up for our customers, always. Customer feedback shapes everything we build.
- 🗣️ Run Towards the Ugly. Name the hardest problem first, then fix it. Candor beats comfort.
- 💡 Think Bigger Fridays. See the gap, fill it. We experiment, learn quickly, and create outsized impact.

Read more about how we think about building teams: https://vitalize.care/blog/our-thoughts-on-building-a-team

## ABOUT VITALIZE’S ENGINEERING TEAM

Every recommendation Vitalize makes flows through this team. We build the intelligence that helps hospitals decide who should float, when to call someone in, when staffing is becoming unsafe, and eventually when the system can safely make those decisions on its own.

This is where Vitalize evolves from software that reports what’s happening into software that actively runs hospital operations.

## THE ROLE

Clinical leaders make hundreds of staffing decisions every day under time pressure using disconnected systems. We’re replacing that with software that reasons through the problem, recommends, and eventually executes the best next actions.

You’ll own the decision engine behind those recommendations, turning messy operational reality into software customers trust with some of the most important decisions inside a hospital.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Design and build the decision logic behind staffing recommendations, alerts, and workflows.
- Own systems that balance staffing rules, hospital policies, patient needs, and operational constraints.
- Partner with our Product Managers, Designers, and other Engineers to build complex software solutions that are easy to use by our customers.
- Work directly with clinical leaders to understand how staffing decisions are made.
- Build software that explains why it reached a recommendation so users can trust, validate, or override it.
- Define where automation ends and human judgment begins, helping Vitalize safely automate more of hospital operations over time.
- Continuously improve the system using customer feedback, production data, and real-world outcomes.

## WHAT YOU’LL BRING

- Expertise with Typescript
- Instinct to dive into the Why
- Experience working across the entire tech stack.
- Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason through complicated edge cases.
- Comfort working directly with customers to understand problems and rapidly improve the product.
- Clear communication and a high ownership mindset.

If these problems excite you, we’d love to talk, even if your background doesn’t perfectly match every bullet above.

## OUR STACK

Bun • TypeScript • Effect • React • TanStack Router • Planetscale

## BENEFITS

- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k) with company match
- Flexible PTO
- Unlimited travel budget to visit customer sites
- Bi-annual company off-sites
- Free meals in-office
- $5,000 relocation bonus
- Desk setup reimbursement
- Commuter benefits
- Monthly gym/wellness stipend
- An awesome office in Jackson Square, steps from the water

## About Vitalize

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Vitalize provides an AI-powered platform that unifies staffing, scheduling, flow, and capacity for health systems, replacing manual processes with proactive, optimized operations.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; Y Combinator Winter 2023 batch)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2021 (per LinkedIn) / 2023 (per Y Combinator batch)
- **Founders**: Sanketh Andhavarapu (Co-Founder & CPO), Veeraj Shah (Co-Founder & CEO), Nikhil D'Souza (Co-Founder & CTO, departed April 2026)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Healthcare operations technology (staffing, scheduling, workforce management)
- **Target customers**: B2B – health systems, hospitals, acute, procedural, and ambulatory care organizations
- **Mission**: Build a world where hospital operations are safe, autonomous, fair, and cost-effective

## Products & Services
- **AI-Powered Scheduling**: Automates shift creation and filling, reducing manual scheduling time by ~70%.
- **Predictive Analytics**: Proactive insights on workforce strategy, volume, acuity, and cost to optimize staffing decisions.
- **Flow and Capacity Optimization**: Integrates volume, acuity, cost, skills, and patient flow into every staffing decision.
- **Command Center for Staffing Offices**: Centralized dashboard enabling optimal decisions while removing manual processes and subjectivity.
- **Integrations**: Connects with existing HR, payroll, T&A, and EMR systems so teams can see value without changing workflows.

All offerings are delivered as a SaaS platform with deep change management support.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding – seed rounds in 2022 (1 investor) and April 2023 (8 investors, led by Y Combinator); amount not publicly stated.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (lead), Tom Blomfield (primary YC partner), and other top healthcare/technology investors. Customers include MemorialCare and Hendrick Health.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Grew 8× in under 18 months
  - Deployed across dozens of hospitals, used by tens of thousands of clinical staff
  - Headcount grew 168% YoY to ~30 employees (as of mid-2026)
  - Operating in 5 countries (US, Brazil, India, Nigeria, South Africa)
  - Active job postings: 9 (as of July 2026), with monthly posting growth of +12.5%

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified platform** covering staffing, scheduling, flow, and capacity – not a point solution.
- **On-site change management** – team embeds with customers from day one to drive adoption and ROI.
- **Deep integrations** with existing hospital systems (HR, payroll, EMR) minimize disruption.
- **Predictive AI** that proactively identifies gaps and recommends best-fit staff, reducing premium shift use and FTE leakage.
- **Demonstrated ROI** within 90 days, with customer testimonials citing massive improvements in productivity and labor cost reduction.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue expanding across acute, procedural, and ambulatory care within health systems.
- Deepen integrations and predictive capabilities to further automate labor operations.
- Scale the customer base and headcount, particularly in engineering, product, and deployment roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Customer-obsession to the extreme – team members have moved on-site to live at customer sites and taken flights with 2 hours’ notice to visit users.
- **Autonomy**: “Everyone has unusual freedom to take initiative” – ownership of problems end-to-end, no micromanagement.
- **Values**: Move fast (decide, act, iterate), relentless curiosity, challenge the status quo, unorthodox thinking.
- **Equity**: Everyone is an owner.
- **Work policy**: Remote US allowed (per YC job postings), with HQ in San Francisco. Many roles require on-site presence at customer hospitals.
- **Engineering culture**: Senior Full-Stack Engineer and Senior Product Engineer roles listed with competitive salary ranges ($180K–$260K + equity). Emphasis on building modern technology to replace paper-based hospital operations.

## Sources
1. [vitalize.care](https://vitalize.care/)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vitalize)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/vitalize)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vitalizecare)

## Other roles at Vitalize

- [Deployment Strategist](https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-strategist-vitalize-san-francisco-zvm410nxzawe) — San Francisco, CA
- [Staff Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-engineer-vitalize-san-francisco-9kf9grwdnxx5) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Full Stack Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-full-stack-engineer-vitalize-san-francisco-rv5mt37qq2vv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Support Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/product-support-specialist-vitalize-us-east-coast-jap6785f17xn) — US East Coast
- [Senior Product Manager, Foundations](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-foundations-vitalize-san-francisco-qv84sjxagjn3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-vitalize-remote-xznshacpmqwm)
- [Recruiting Operations Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-operations-coordinator-vitalize-san-francisco-yv3aww5zkj7p) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Technical Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-technical-recruiter-vitalize-san-francisco-0q7by9cb327n) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-vitalize-san-francisco-xbk2g37n84bw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-manager-vitalize-san-francisco-jtre2hm7q5np) — San Francisco, CA