Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.

Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.

Background:

Cedar is a patient payment and engagement platform that leverages data science, consumer-centric design and technology to improve the healthcare experience for patients.

The Data Science team plays a critical role in achieving Cedar’s vision. We ensure data and insights are accessible and trusted by all internal and external stakeholders to enable data-driven decision-making. Through analytics, descriptive analyses, and statistical models, we consistently aim to better understand the needs of patients, find improvement opportunities, and impact the product development process. We run experiments to test our various hypotheses and measure our progress. We build ML models and embed them into our web app to deliver a personalized experience to patients. We help differentiate Cedar's product offerings with hard-to-copy competitive advantages.

To do this, we have built an open, supportive, and collaborative team culture. “Love thy teammate” is one of our Data Science values, and we live into this value by operating from a mindset of curiosity, possibility, and the best intentions of each of our team members. As a team, we are dedicated to continually growing our technical excellence and collaborative excellence, equally.

We are also not doing this alone; we partner with the other Makers teams (Product, Engineering, Design, and User Research) to grow our impact. We also work with Commercial teams to evangelize our vision to clients and get market feedback on which pain points are the most urgent to solve.

You can read about some of our work on the Patient Experience Studio, a blog we share with the Design team.

The Role:

Cedar is scaling rapidly and the demand for data and machine learning expertise is increasing. We are seeking a Data Scientist III, ML Engineering to join our team and build machine learning solutions that optimize the performance of Cedar’s product. You will conduct deep analyses of data to develop a thorough understanding of our product features and how patients utilize them, along the way becoming an expert in Cedar data. You will design, develop, and iterate on ML-powered product features to support and differentiate Cedar’s product offerings, and closely measure and monitor the performance of these ML models to identify and drive opportunities for continuous improvement.  

Responsibilities:

• Develop a deep understanding of Cedar patients and our product, including the mechanisms of Cedar’s platform and Cedar’s data
• Build and optimize pipelines for data extraction, processing, and transformation; perform in-depth data analysis, data cleaning, and feature engineering on (mostly) structured, tabular data 
• Design, build, and deploy scalable and maintainable machine learning solutions that solve key problems for our patients and customers
• Rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of machine learning models by analyzing their performance, and identify opportunities for iteration and improvement
• Collaborate closely with data engineers and product engineers to productionize pipelines and ML solutions
• Present and clearly communicate findings and underlying methodology to partners across all levels of the organization, and present externally to Cedar clients
• Identify and assess new opportunities for applying machine learning techniques to drive business value 

Skills and Experience:

• 5+ years of experience working with data, with 3+ years of experience in machine learning in an industry setting
• Expertise in both SQL and Python is required
• Expertise in machine learning techniques such as regression, classification, clustering, and ensemble methods; not only in training performant models, but also how to use them successfully for business impact and how to employ effective guardrails 
• Experience productionizing models and knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS
• Excellent communication and collaboration with stakeholders, acting as a thought-partner for other data scientists and cross-functional teams
• Strong analytical ability and an understanding of statistical methods 
• Understanding of software engineering principles 
• A mindset focused on growth and learning
• Experience working with healthcare data or payments/billing data is a plus, but not required

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. 

Compensation Range and Benefits

• Salary/Hourly Rate Range*: $148,750 - $175,000 
• This role is equity eligible
• This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package

#LI-KC 

#LI-NYC

What do we offer to the ideal candidate?

• A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
• Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
• For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of PTO per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
• 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
• Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including the Cedarian Advisory Group (a cross-functional cohort focused on increasing internal inclusiveness at Cedar) and three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians) 
• Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles) and health benefits that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
• Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
• Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally

About us

Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. Over the past several years, we’ve raised more than $350 million in funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global, bringing Cedar’s valuation to $3.2 billion.

As of December 2023, Cedar is engaging with 25 million patients on an annualized basis, and is on target to process $2.6 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar’s ambition is to serve 50-60 million Americans by 2025, about half of the U.S. population that makes medical payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.