About Anima

Hey! Shun here, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Anima. Our mission is to deliver precision medicine to everyone in the world in under 24 hours.

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 in the NHS and quit out of frustration at seeing countless cases of people dying because they got misdiagnosed or didn’t get the right care plan.

Seeing the problem space at all abstraction levels, including as a doctor and at the HM Treasury, 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 effectively 10x’ing the capacity of 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.

Build With Us

Today, there’s a lot of hype around ‘verticalized AI’ but when our journey started in 2021, people outside of the ML community barely knew or cared about active reinforcement learning. ChatGPT didn’t exist. I remember getting frustrated and thinking… ‘don’t you get how big of a deal this is?!’

Since Day 1 (as written in our YC application), we’ve been building towards the holy grail of personalised medicine and deep phenotyping, powered by our proprietary active learning architecture. As I said earlier, I actually submitted a 2021 patent that was prescient for the sparse MoE and active learning loop that is commonplace today with LLMs. We’ve been building and building towards this secret plan this whole time, and now have one of the biggest, highest quality labelled datasets in the world.

When everyone is technical and make great decisions, it’s much easier to stay on the same page & execute rapidly. This means we have a super short latency from ideation to real usage.

Here are 2 concrete examples with specs and timelines (we’d be delighted to demo any of these to you):

• Alex, a clinical engineer, built ‘Slack for medical teams’, supporting 1000s of channels per organisation and a real time single source of truth for patient data, in 4 weeks, picking up a large set of new technologies on the way (ground up built from low-level services like Appsync, GraphQL, not Twilio).

• Dennis built a lightning fast cloud document library for clinics in a few days, with <100ms traversals through preloading. Recently, when faced with an ancient legacy API that took 30s to return an array of hits, he hacked together an async indexing service with caching that reduced latency to <2s without harmful race conditions. He built and deployed to prod this in under 24 hours.

If high growth delta and joining an elite scrappy crew is your priority, you’re going to love it here.

Does this sound like you?

• Hungry and wants their shot to change the world – a force of nature when empowered with the tools, resources and development to do it. Sees joining Anima as potentially their shot to do this, and takes duty to crew and mission extremely seriously.

• Obsessively concerned with UX, and optimises for this when building features rather than arbitrary technical goals.

• Bored and frustrated at big companies; feel held back by red tape, bureaucracy and poor decisions.

• Keen to understand the big picture & entire context of the company and vertical; impatient for growth towards a senior executive role.

• Expert competency in TS, plus being reasonably tech + language agnostic. Comfortable with key frameworks/libraries like Angular, Node and React. Able to work full stack in JS/TS. Values pragmatism and open discussion from first principles rather than dogma.

• 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).

• Disciplined towards best practice version control, CI/CD and code extensibility. Values ‘interface safety’ through dimensionality reduction at interfaces.

• Exceptional at ‘breadth-first search’ through Googling when tackling new challenges, and consistently mindful of local maxima.

• Intellectually curious with a growth mindset – 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.

• Familiarity with AWS (e.g. APIG, SQS, DynamoDB, Lambda, Cognito, Amplify, CloudFormation) and/or hungry to learn.

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.

Our current stack & what to expect from the role

We 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.

We have 2 separate fully functional web apps in prod: one for clinical users and one for patients. Our stack is currently entirely in JS/TS: Angular + Capacitor + Electron, React (internal tools), Amplitude (analytics), a fully serverless backend in AWS (Cognito, Appsync GraphQL, Lambda, DynamoDB). We have good functional & unit test coverage and CI/CD.

Our stack is in a great place already: highly scalable, cost effective, good test coverage, easily maintained, secure and performant with minimal to zero ops. The product and codebase are stable and loved by our users. We write, test, deploy & ship new features rapidly.

We’re looking to add talented engineers who are hungry and understand the urgency and importance of what we’re doing for society.

First month – some examples of what to expect:

• Help add further key third party API integrations, including with legacy EMR systems and national APIs like e.g. the electronic prescribing service, allowing Anima to directly issue prescriptions.

• Iterate on a proprietary graph traversal algorithm to improve patient care and clinical value, and increasingly move away from explicit curation to implicit curation by NNs.

• Ship important features that will directly increase delta lives saved in your first 2 weeks.

• Join customer calls to develop a deep understanding of their fundamental motivations and needs/pain points.

Next 6 months – some examples of what to expect:

• Help architect and deploy a scalable & cost effective ETL data pipeline with version control, outputting clean data ready for tokenisation.

• Help deploy our active deep learning training & validation architecture to prod, so that we can correctly eat up our ‘1.0’ systems at the right time

• Build cutting edge products like global context aware chat with semantic search, care orchestration and LLM-enabled cloud telephony e2e

• Hire/scale the team, while implementing the right processes at the right times to maximise discounted team productivity and minimise discounted dev time cost for shipping.

6+ months – some examples of what to expect:

• Potential to transition to a more managerial/executive role. Lead an autonomous lance of elite engineers to fix healthcare and save lives.

• Work with the ML/data team to creatively ideate and ship features to improve ETL pipeline throughput and quality through a data-driven approach powered by analytics.