Founding Head of Product

About this role

📌 ABOUT ALPACA HEALTH

Alpaca Health enables clinicians to become entrepreneurs, starting in autism care.

We help clinicians launch and scale their own clinics by providing AI-powered software, payer contracting, and full back-office infrastructure. Our goal is simple: shift power in healthcare away from large consolidated entities and back to clinicians.

Our product is a complex marketplace business. For providers, we manage the insurance operations and back office admin of their business. For patients, we act as a front door to finding a best-fit therapist. And, we accomplish this by having an operations team, enabled by best-in-class software.

We are growing quickly and expanding into new states this year. The problems we are solving are operationally complex, high-stakes, and deeply meaningful for families.

We've raised over $14M in funding from early-stage investors like Core Innovation Capital, Adverb Ventures, and South Park Commons, and are building for long-term category leadership. More importantly, we're serving hundreds of patients, while growing 30% MoM.

🎯 ROLE: FOUNDING PRODUCT MANAGER

We are hiring a Head of Product to build an AI-native platform that powers every side of our market: providers, families, and our internal operations team.

We're not looking for a traditional Head of Product. There's been no PM at Alpaca to date: Operations Leads have worked directly with Engineers to build product. We believe that's what an AI-native product organization looks like: less and less separation between the business and building.

But our product is getting more complex — more stakeholders, more capabilities, more integrations — while engineering velocity keeps increasing. That demands real thought around launch plans, knowledge base quality, QA, and more. And it means building the shared product sense across Operations Leads — so good judgment doesn't depend on you being in every room

You'll define what AI-native product management looks like at a business built this way.

This is a leadership-level role: you'll have license to hire, bring on freelancers, and set the direction of product at Alpaca. You'll report directly to the founders.

We prefer NYC-based candidates (or open to relocation). We work 5 days a week in person.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

You have taste, and that shows in our products for patients (B2C), providers (B2B) and internal operations teams (internal tools).

You care about the details of user flows and design, not just whether a feature works. Healthcare has trained patients and providers to expect clunky portals and forms that ask the same question five times. We think that's a failure of imagination, not a fact of the industry. Families and clinicians deserve the same craft as any consumer app they use, and you're offended on their behalf when healthcare software falls short. You can hire and manage design talent that meets your own bar.

Build for the whole business, not just the app.

We are fundamentally an operations business. We sell the outcome to our provider entrepreneurs (done for you healthcare admin), and accomplish the outcome more efficiently than competitors with AI enablement. This means that internal tools are a core part of our product. You should love designing integrations with HubSpot, or our own internal CRMs, where our ops teams across client intake, prior authorizations, revenue cycle, provider success, and more actually live.

Treat product as a process across the whole org, not just a function.

Our Strategy & Operations team members are empowered to build prototypes and sit directly with engineers. You won't act as a gatekeeper between the business and engineering; your job is to facilitate and translate. Some days that means coaching an ops team member on how to write a good ticket. Other days it means designing the product yourself. Whatever it takes to get good product shipped.

Grow the team the AI-native way.

Engineering is shipping faster than ever, and we feel the strain on the product side. We don't want to solve that by throwing more PM headcount at it that slows down the velocity we've built. As Head of Product, you'll define how a small, AI-native product org keeps pace with engineering without becoming a bottleneck through tooling, process, and leverage, not just hiring.

Get in the weeds.

This isn't a role where you review mocks on Fridays. You're prototyping, pressure-testing, and iterating. You have opinions about the details. AI is changing what it means to be "in the weeds," and you're leaning into that, using tools like Claude Code and Cursor to go from idea to working demo yourself.

Set the tempo.

Create pace and urgency without chaos. Define what "fast" means for Alpaca's product org: how decisions get made, how work moves through the system, how the team stays focused on what matters. Remove friction. Raise the clock speed.

Win with us.

This is a company-building role, not just a product role. You'll contribute to decisions that extend well beyond your function: go-to-market, hiring, and company strategy. You care about Alpaca winning, not just Product winning.

🧠 WHO YOU ARE

You are extremely ambitious and want to build category-defining products.

You are AI-native, you already use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or similar to build and prototype.

You are technical enough to understand how systems actually work (APIs, data pipelines, AI/LLM systems).

You are a builder: you default to creating, not coordinating.

You are a strong product thinker with clear opinions and high judgment.

You are obsessed with customers and spend time methodically breaking down complex workflows into clear, step-by-step processes.

You thrive in ambiguity and move quickly without waiting for perfect clarity.

You are not a project manager—you make decisions and drive outcomes.

REQUIREMENTS

4-8 years of product management experience with mix of experiences B2C or B2B (preference for B2C healthcare,

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