Got Questions?

• Why full stack healthcare at Nurx?

  Building tools for patients, doctors, customer service associates, and pharmacies is hard. Integrating with insurance companies makes that problem even more difficult. Why do we bother? Simple: We know that a lot of the waste and frustration arises where these systems don’t interface well together, and we’re excited by the challenge of fixing this.
  
  Consider birth control. Even women who have insurance and live near a doctor face inconvenience and expense when trying to access a prescription. Waiting months for an appointment, missing work to see the doctor, standing in line at the pharmacy, and then discovering that her birth control prescription isn’t covered by her insurance plan or has a hefty copay — this is the inefficient and unreasonable experience many people face today. The situation is even worse for people who don’t have insurance, don’t live near a provider willing to prescribe birth control, or simply don’t have the time or money necessary to overcome the obstacles between them and essential healthcare.
  
  We believe that the only solution here is to integrate that process, so providers can understand costs and insurance coverage before they write a prescription, and provide personalized care on the patient’s schedule, from wherever she is (no appointments or office visits required). We want pharmacists to focus on ensuring a patient’s medicine is safe and doesn’t interact with other prescriptions, not fielding faxes from her provider or waiting on hold with her insurance company. To do that, everyone needs real-time visibility up and downstream, and we need to eliminate the wasted time capturing and re-entering data. That’s why we’re going full stack.

• How do we build it?

  We like to think of ourselves as small, and just starting on a long journey to be the biggest primary care provider in the US. As engineers, we want to keep our stack simple as long as we can so it’s easy-to-read code, support it in production, and change it when we need to evolve. We also don’t sell our software, we build it for ourselves, so we can learn and adapt quickly.
  
  That usually means we prefer tools that have a strong community, stable APIs, and provide some security updates and monitoring. We also like things that are easy to debug when they break.
  
  Here’s how our stack breaks down by team:
  
  Core Platform, Patient Experience, and Operations
  

  • Languages: TypeScript (some JavaScript, but we’re migrating)
  • Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis
  • Frameworks and Tools: Express, Knex, Ember, Bootstrap
  • Object storage: S3

  
  Data and Machine Learning
  

  • Languages: Python, R
  • Databases: PostgreSQL, Presto (Amazon Athena)
  • Frameworks and Tools: Mode Analytics, DBT, Tensorflow, Fiona/Shapely (GIS)

  
  Mobile Applications
  

  • Languages: Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android)

  
  Core Infrastructure and Shared Tools
  

  • Hosting: AWS
  • Ticketing: Phabricator
  • Wiki and Collaboration: Google GSuite, Salesforce Quip
  • Monitoring and Telemetry: New Relic (APM, Synthetics, Infrastructure), CloudWatch, StatusCake
  • Log Analysis: Splunk
  • Oncall Management: PagerDuty
  • Communication: Slack, WebEx

  
  In case you’re wondering where Docker, Kubernetes, and the other hot tools are, we don’t need them (yet) because our infrastructure is still somewhat small (<100 hosts.) It’s still easier for us to manage larger services directly within AWS, and it’s a lot simpler. We know that will change as we grow, but will hold until it’s needed and beneficial.

• What is company culture like at Nurx?

  Team Nurx strives to operate according to a set of values that underscores our focus on judgment-free access to healthcare and desire to prove how a product-focused mindset can help change healthcare.
  
  In a nutshell, our values are:
  
  

  • We are patient-first
  • We dare to be better
  • We are in this together
  • We own it
  • We do the right thing

  
  
  We're also growing as a team, with more than 240 employees and 80 independent medical providers working in our San Francisco headquarters, our fully-owned pharmacy in Syracuse, our Miami nursing and customer service hub and remotely throughout the U.S.

• What is engineering culture like at Nurx?

  In addition to our company values, the Nurx engineering team has a few other areas of focus:
  
  

  • Craftsmanship. We care about the quality of our work, and strive to make it stable and easy for others to understand and modify. We’re thoughtful about how today’s seemingly small decisions can have an outsized impact on our code tomorrow in terms of how easy it will be to maintain, how expensive it will be to operate, and how strictly we can maintain its security.
  • Inclusivity. We think the strongest teams encourage everyone to participate, regardless of their background or previous experience. In 2018, we changed our interview process to get rid of live coding, added real examples from Nurx so you can decide if the work we do interests you, and started interviewing for mentoring and debugging skills. In 2019, we hired our first distributed team (iOS), and during the COVID pandemic transitioned to hiring remote individuals within the U.S. Our goal is to build teams that can always connect to our patients and their challenges.
  • Data-driven. “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” - John Adams. As engineers, our job is to ensure everyone has the right data to do their job. Patients need data about how to safely take their medications, doctors need data about a patient’s health profile, and our leaders need data about where our service is (and isn’t) working well. The software we write is central to every aspect of our patient experience and we believe it’s our job to observe and record what happens, then to make that data available to everyone in the company.
  • Humble. We all have something to learn, and something we can teach. However it’s impossible to learn if you aren’t willing to listen or you don’t believe that someone else can teach you something. We strive to break from the historical engineering mold of strong opinions strongly held, and be a place where people are free to experiment and unafraid of being wrong, where we admit when we don’t know the answer and are willing to help others along the way. It’s key to how we dare to be better.

• How does Nurx interview engineers?

  Engineering interviews can be notoriously challenging, full of questions entirely unrelated to what you’ll do every day, and high-pressure, asking you to write code on a whiteboard and without the help of the tools we regularly use. In some cases, this style of interview results in bias interviews against people from non-traditional backgrounds (e.g. people who don’t know red-black trees).
  
  Our interview is designed to be different, by giving you a choice in how you show us your technical skills, and focuses on more than just writing code. We want to see how you design systems, debug an issue in an application, and mentor others, as well as how you create software.
  
  Most of our loops are three steps: a phone screen with a recruiter or manager, a technical screen with a future colleague, and an onsite interview with your peers. Our goal is to discover what you’re great at.
  
  We also want you to learn about what we do at Nurx. Every question, from coding to design, is an example of a real problem we solve here. We encourage people to ask questions about these problems, and above all, let us know if they’re something that interests you.
  
  The hard part is trying to fit this into a reasonable amount of time, as we respect that grueling interview processes with a half-dozen rounds are both exhausting and conflict with other commitments — jobs, family, and free time. Our goal is to fit the entire process into 10-12 hours, including interviews, at-home work, and debrief calls. It’s a big investment, but one we think compares favorably within the industry and works with a variety of life situations.
  
  Engineering Interview Process
  1. Recruiting Phone Screen
  2. Hiring Manager Phone Screen
  3. Technical Video Screen
  4. Virtual Onsite Interview
  

  • Architecture/Design - algorithm and systems design (white-boarding)
  • Live Coding — we use Coderpad to facilitate this
  • Debugging - combination of debugging or knowledge deep dive
  • Mentoring - review of our team's code or tech talk (if senior)
  • Culture/Leadership - 1:1 w/ the VP of Engineering
  • Candidate Debrief - candidate provides feedback to their recruiter on interview process + candidate experience

  
  
  5. Offer + Reference Check
  
  Our hope is that everyone who interviews with us leaves excited about what we do and where we’re going, and has been treated with respect.

• Where are you hiring?

  At this time we are hiring remotely in specific U.S. states: Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC.

• Are you hiring remote positions?

  Yes, at this time we are hiring remotely in specific U.S. states: Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC.