Hey, Andrei (the UBC grad) and founder of Human API here.
We still have a great group of people in Vancouver (and that office will be open indefinitely), however we've decided not to expand the team there right now. The biggest driver in this decision was communication overhead across the two offices -- it's certainly not an insurmountable task, however we can't ignore the benefits of having most people under the same roof.
I personally love Vancouver and some of our best team members are located there, so if we decide to expand across two offices again, we'll definitely start there.
Air Canada Express recently started 2x daily YVR-SJC; direct connections between Vancouver and the Valley may help with communications with the Redwood City office.
Are you willing to publicly divulge an ETA on when you'll come back to Vancouver? Please come back. I really love Human API's vision, and I don't want Vancouver's biggest tech players to be companies like:
-SAP (which I wish could be relegated to the ashheap of history in all its ABAP glory)
-TELUS (a telco monopoly)
-EA Canada (a slave-driving AAA game studio)
-Tableau (which will be doomed when Microsoft PowerBI gets in gear and SharePoint integration improves)
Human API, (Palo Alto, CA), Full Stack Software Engineers
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Human API is building the universal health data API, data infrastructure & developer platform to make it really easy to integrate health data.
We are looking to add core full stack / data engineers to our fast growing team. We are well funded (Max Levchin, Andreessen Horrowitz, Eric Schmidt, among others) and based in downtown Palo Alto in sunny California.
We're an early stage health technology startup based in San Francisco. We are building the universal health data infrastructure to power the next generation of healthcare apps (and the developer tools to go along with it). We recently closed a funding round of $2.1M with some awesome investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Eric Schmidt, Thomas Korte, Alex Payne, Max Levchin, and a few others.
We are adding 4 more engineers to our core team to help us build out our infrastructure and continue to scale our API.
We are working on solving some of this, specifically for health data, at http://humanapi.co - you can connect your various data sources, and we then give you a central personalized API you can query.
(full disclosure, I am the founder of this company)
It is free for the end user to sign up and use as a personal API (and we already have around 50 or so services). What we charge developers for is building multi-user applications on top of it.
If not, you can (eventually) use Personable.me, but I'm still in the process of integrating enough sources that one could realistically use for health analysis.
Sorry, yes, I should have qualified that. Yes, I'm building that. It's only about a week's worth of development thus far, but I've got a fitbit and a WiiThings scale on the way to start integrating those into the API as well.
There are a few basic assumptions underlying your vision that may be useful to flush out further (I can tell you that, from similar experience, what you are going to bump in to is a fundamental lack of desire from the majority of the system to see change).
1. You are betting that Obamacare will actually drive the system towards "accountable" care -- we are a long way off from this unfortunately. I won't rehash it all here, but many ACOs are turning back from the model: http://www.hhnmag.com/hhnmag/HHNDaily/HHNDailyDisplay.dhtml?...
2. You are betting that patient engagement in their own health will be high, particularly for the high cost, at risk patients. This has been historically proven not to be the case. High touch intervention + technology works (i.e. take a look at the Diabetes Prevention Programs now being run digitally by organizations such as Omada) but technology by itself has had a pretty low hit rate with driving meaningful patient engagement for the at risk populations. For some reading on the challenges of adherence, check out: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1661624/
I really do think we need more people working on these problems, so keep at it, and if I can help at all please let me know!
> You are betting that patient engagement in their own health will be high, particularly for the high cost, at risk patients. This has been historically proven not to be the case.
The commonest reason for transplanted organ failure is that the patient isn't compliant with medication.
This happens in UK (free surgery, free meds) and US (expensive surgery, expensive meds).
HumanAPI is building the unified API for all human health data, and we are hiring another experienced engineer to add to the core team.
We started this company in late March this year, and are currently hard at work building the infrastructure to pull in and analyze health data from a wide variety of sources. Some of these include: wearable sensors, consumer health devices, smartphones, and genetic testing services (like 23&Me). We collect this data, normalize it, and have built an API to allow any application developer to easily and securely build applications with our service.
We are looking for a long term hire, and this position includes meaningful equity in an exciting, fast growing startup.
The person joining must be an opinionated, independent thinker and feel comfortable making big decisions. You have experience shipping real products to users. You are broadly curious, have probably had some side projects, and you have ideally hacked around with some hardware as well.
You are versatile across technologies and platforms, and can teach yourself what you don't know quickly. You don't identify with specific technologies as much as you identify with the problems that need to be solved.
Ideally, though not required, you have some experience with distributed database systems (cassandra, hadoop, hbase, etc.), security (HIPAA), and generally get excited about data, sensors, health, and how we can combine them to make people healthy at scale.
We are based in Palo Alto, California - the right candidate can work remotely for a time period, though we would like to get the whole team under the same roof soon.
Come help us build the human health data infrastructure layer.
To apply, send an email directly to andrei@humanapi.co with your background, some relevant links (github, linkedin, etc), and any questions you have :)
We still have a great group of people in Vancouver (and that office will be open indefinitely), however we've decided not to expand the team there right now. The biggest driver in this decision was communication overhead across the two offices -- it's certainly not an insurmountable task, however we can't ignore the benefits of having most people under the same roof.
I personally love Vancouver and some of our best team members are located there, so if we decide to expand across two offices again, we'll definitely start there.