Announcing Oscar’s first engineering outpost: Los Angeles

By Andrew Shults, Senior Director of Engineering at Oscar

Nearly two years after announcing our plans to expand to California, we’re excited to announce today that Oscar will be opening its first engineering outpost in Los Angeles this summer. As we’ve grown to serve over 10,000 Oscar members in West LA and Orange County and become a member of the thriving tech community, meeting hundreds of passionate technologists who want to improve health care, we’re confident it’s the perfect place to grow our tech team.

At Oscar, engineers and product managers get to tackle one of society’s biggest challenges: fixing the health care experience. We’re working to rebuild the core elements of the health insurance infrastructure from scratch to reorient it around what’s right for the health and experience of the member. Technology, data, and design inform everything we do, from in-app search and appointment scheduling for doctor appointments to how we approach user interactions with customer care. As the first truly cloud-based health insurer, our tech team is uniquely positioned to move quickly and boldly to improve the health care experience for our members and providers.

We believe that patients and providers should have all the contextualized information that they need to make better and more informed health decisions. This value guides our tech team as we build reliable and maintainable applications and infrastructure and design interfaces that make interacting with the health care system easier for everyone.

Some recent projects we’re building from scratch include:

• an in-house claims processing and adjudication system.
• a clinical dashboard for providers that display’s a patient’s health data and uses machine learning to generates alerts around likely health conditions.
• data infrastructure that provides real-time visibility into provider availability and status.
• a search engine that effectively and efficiently connects members to the care they need.
• a generalized platform to communicate with people via various channels, including email, snail mail, push notifications, and SMS.

We’re building a lot of great tools in order to create an end-to-end healthcare system that functions seamlessly. Doing so requires a variety of talented technologists with different backgrounds and skillsets — this is where the LA office comes in. As Oscar’s first technology office outside of New York, the LA-based team will play a key role in establishing Oscar’s West Coast culture.

The new team will work as a standalone unit in collaboration with over 100 engineers, product managers, and designers that currently power Oscar’s operations from our New York City-based headquarters. Our Los Angeles team will have the support of an established office with best practices and resources to lean on, while simultaneously operating like an eight person startup.

Are you an engineer or product manager who wants to make health care a simple and enjoyable experience? Interested in working somewhere that deploys over 100 times per day and is quick to adopt best-in-class technologies including React Native, Typed Javascript, Go, and Apache Kafka? Current openings can be found on our Careers page.

You can learn more about Oscar here, and sign up for our monthly newsletter here.