--- title: 'Strategic Business Operations Lead at Develop Health' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-business-operations-lead-develop-health-menlo-park-sp5jyagddpzd' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-15' --- # Strategic Business Operations Lead at Develop Health - **Company:** Develop Health - **Location:** Menlo Park, CA - **Compensation:** $120k–$190k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-01 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/develop-health/f209646b-d221-4186-b0b1-a437fff61d4b ## Job description Develop Health is on a mission to use AI to radically accelerate access to life-saving medications. By automating complex, manual healthcare processes—like benefit verification and prior authorization— we've been growing rapidly and over the past couple of years have helped over 2.5 million patients! We’re partnering with some of the largest pharmacy benefit managers and payers in the nation, revolutionizing how healthcare interactions occur by eliminating human delays and inefficiencies. Our small, elite team of founders and engineers have previously launched and exited successful healthcare startups including Rupa Health and Canvas Medical. We are now scaling rapidly following a major funding round. ## About The Role We're hiring a Strategic Business Operations Lead to make sure every new strategic account actually runs well once it's signed. A new payer or PBM partnership goes live and a dozen operational questions come with it. Who works the queue. What the SLA is. Which cases need a human and which the product should handle. What "good" looks like in the numbers. You'll be the person who answers those questions, then builds the systems so nobody has to ask them again. Day to day that means working real benefit verification and prior authorization cases, finding where workflows break, and turning each fix into a documented process the team can run without you. You'll also help manage our BPO partners, keep the daily queue moving, and build the dashboards leadership uses to see how operations are performing. The unusual part: our product is the automation. A lot of this job is spotting work our AI should be doing and getting it in front of product and engineering with enough detail to build. You'll report to our Head of Pharmacy Operations and PBM Relations. Much of our operational playbook is still being written, so you'll have a lot of latitude and a lot of blank pages. What You'll Do — Impact In Your First 3–6 Months - Run the work. Take on complex benefit verification and prior authorization cases and become the person the team trusts to untangle them. - Find and fix what's broken. Track down workflow bottlenecks, payer and PBM issues, and process gaps that slow the team down or frustrate customers. - Write things down. Turn what you learn into workflow docs, playbooks, and repeatable processes that hold up as volume grows. - Feed product and engineering. Bring customer pain points back with enough specificity to prioritize, and flag where automation could replace manual work. - Level up the team. Build the training materials and knowledge resources that cut escalations. What You'll Own — Driving Growth Beyond 6 Months - Support our BPO partnerships. Be the day-to-day contact for our outsourcing partners, hold them to quality standards, and drive improvements in service delivery. - Help plan capacity. Forecast volume, flag coverage gaps across time zones, and help onboard new team members as we hire. - Build the reporting. Own the operational metrics, SLA dashboards, and performance analytics that leadership uses to make decisions. - Keep the queue healthy. Balance incoming demand against team capacity so wait times stay low and SLAs hold as we scale. - Turn insight into leverage. Convert frontline patterns into product and process changes that cut support volume and improve unit economics. ## What You'll Bring On Day 1 - 2–4 years in operations, ideally in healthcare, health tech, or SaaS. - Composure under pressure. You've handled complex, high-stakes work and can keep everyone calm through it. - Strong analytical instincts. You pull your own data and build your own dashboards and reports. - A root-cause habit. You investigate, spot patterns, and fix the system rather than the symptom. - Comfort with ambiguity. You've worked somewhere the process didn't exist yet, and you built it. ## What You'll Need To Learn Quickly - Our domain and product: how our workflows and automation layer map onto real payer, PBM, and provider processes, and where the product creates leverage. - How we operate: our escalation paths and engineering workflows, and how to raise an issue so it gets resolved fast. - Payer nuance: how different payers interpret prior authorization and benefit verification requirements, and what those differences mean for customers. Bonus Points - Hands-on experience with pharmacy benefit prior authorization or benefit verification on the payer or PBM side. - A strong grasp of the patient access journey from prescription to dispensing, including where payers create friction. - You've built support processes, documentation, or training from scratch before. - Familiarity with AI tooling, BPO workforce management software, or BI and reporting platforms. This Might Not Be The Right Fit If - You want to manage a team on day one. This role builds the systems and runs the work. People management may come as we scale, but it isn't the job today. - You'd rather stay out of the queue. Your credibility here comes from working real cases yourself, not from reviewing someone else's summary of them. - You want a playbook. Most of ours is still unwritten, and writing it is a large part of the role. - You want to hand the analysis to someone else. You'll build your own dashboards and pull your own data. ## What We Offer - Competitive base salary plus meaningful early-stage equity. - Health, dental, and vision coverage, and flexible PTO. - High-end workstation and AI tooling budget. - Work that makes medication access dramatically faster for hundreds of thousands of patients a month, with room to grow as the operations function scales. If you're passionate about building meaningful technology in healthcare, we'd love to hear from you. ## About Develop Health ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Develop Health is an insurance AI platform that automates medication prior authorization and benefit verification for healthcare providers directly within their clinical workflow. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: Menlo Park, California, United States (also listed as San Francisco, CA on LinkedIn) - **Founded**: 2022 - **Founders**: Mel van Londen (Co-Founder & CEO) and Benjamin Easton (Co-Founder & CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Healthcare Technology (Prior Authorization Automation / Insurance AI) - **Target customers**: B2B — healthcare providers, digital health companies, and physician practices (e.g., Calibrate); integrates with EHRs like athenahealth - **Mission or purpose**: To clear the path for medication access by automating the prior authorization lifecycle, reducing administrative burden on clinicians, and getting patients to life-changing therapy faster. ## Products & Services - **Prescription AI Platform**: An AI-powered system that automates the entire prior authorization process. It predicts medication coverage, cost, and requirements at the point of prescribing, automates benefit verification, completes and submits correct prior authorization forms, tracks status updates, and handles denial management by drafting clinical appeals. - **Real-time Benefit Verification**: Provides instant visibility into plan-specific medication coverage, cost, and requirements directly within the EHR workflow. - **Denial Management and Appeals**: If a prior authorization is denied, the system independently drafts and submits comprehensive clinical appeals to defend the treatment plan. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private company) - **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$33.7 million** across two rounds (Pre-Seed and Series A) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Wing Venture Capital (lead, Series A), South Park Commons (lead, Pre-Seed), Afore Capital (Pre-Seed), Analog Ventures, MTech Capital. Key integration partner: athenahealth. - **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew **+200% year-over-year** to 22 employees. Raised a **$17.6M Series A** in late 2025. Launched a major integration with **athenahealth (athenaOne)** in December 2025. Client Calibrate reported a **70% reduction** in hands-on prior authorization time. ## Competitive Advantages - **Deep EHR Integration**: The platform is built to be invisible to the clinician, operating entirely within existing workflows (e.g., athenaOne) without requiring extra clicks or logins. - **End-to-End Automation**: Covers the entire medication access journey from benefit verification to submission to appeals, reducing manual work by up to 90%. - **Proven Outcomes**: Demonstrated real-world results, including reducing approval time from one week to under one day, and a 5–7x reduction in the number of prior authorizations required per member. - **Data Integrity & Compliance**: Maintains high standards of healthcare compliance (HIPAA, etc.) for security and privacy. ## Strategic Focus - **Expand EHR Integrations**: Following the athenahealth integration, the company is likely focused on integrating with other major EHR platforms to reach more providers. - **Scale Commercial Adoption**: Using the Series A funding to grow the customer base beyond early adopters (like Calibrate) into larger health systems and independent practices. - **Deepen AI Capabilities**: Continuing to improve the AI’s ability to predict coverage and automate complex clinical evidence extraction from patient notes. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Mission**: Mission-driven work directly addressing a major cause of physician burnout (the average physician completes 43 prior authorizations per week). The team is small and growing fast. - **Work Model**: **In-Office** (Menlo Park, CA). Employees work from a physical office. - **Team & Growth**: A lean team of 22 with a strong technical core (29% in technical roles). High growth trajectory (+200% YoY headcount) suggests opportunities for impact and career advancement. - **Notable Perks**: Not explicitly listed, but being an early-stage, well-funded startup (Series A) in a high-impact space typically offers significant ownership, equity, and the chance to shape the product and culture. ## Sources 1. [develophealth.ai](https://www.develophealth.ai/) 2. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/develop-health) 3. [CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/develop-health) 4. [Built In](https://builtin.com/company/develop-health) 5. [Ashby Careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/develop-health) ## Other roles at Develop Health - [Senior Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-engineer-develop-health-menlo-park-tjq1tsqwfw88) — Menlo Park, CA - [Founding Growth Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-marketing-lead-develop-health-menlo-park-eeg6m9t37knk) — Menlo Park, CA - [Clinical Product & Operations Lead Pharmacist](https://feeny.ai/job/clinical-product-operations-lead-pharmacist-develop-health-menlo-park-cg9z5d8jknbs) — Menlo Park, CA - [Senior Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-develop-health-menlo-park-fc7kbxfznbx5) — Menlo Park, CA