Chief Medical Officer, Psychiatry (backed by Y Combinator, $5M+ ARR, $20M+ raised)
Job Description
đź§ About Legion Health
At Legion Health, we believe everyone deserves fast, affordable, and world-class health care, and we’re developing the AI infrastructure to deliver it ourselves at world scale.
Legion is building autonomous medical care (the AI doctor), starting with psychiatry. Our AI-native care-delivery platform currently automates 95% of the administrative work required for us to deliver direct patient care. We also recently became the first company ever to receive regulatory authorization to let AI prescribe psychiatric medications, allowing us to not only collapse health care’s admin costs but also its clinical labor costs—shifting this industry’s economics from humans to tokens.
Our technical moat is hard to copy—we combine rich data, production AI, doctors in the loop, and end-to-end care operations to deliver measurably better care to a clinically complex patient population. This has helped us produce 25K+ total visits in just 2 years, all while holding ops costs flat and achieving industry-leading patient NPS and retention. While the last generation of healthcare startups made the existing system incrementally more efficient, Legion is rebuilding full-stack care delivery from first principles. Our vision? A 10X better patient experience that’s higher quality, less expensive, and more scalable than ever before. And a 10X better clinician experience that frees our providers to focus on what matters most: caring for patients.
Legion Health is backed by Y Combinator, leading venture capital firms, and founders from Function Health, Modern Health, Everly Health, Trusted Health, Clipboard Health, PatientPing, Sesame Care, Faire, EasyPost, and fuboTV.
Join us as we build the future of health care: faster, higher-quality, and more affordable, powered by doctors and AI working together.
📍 Role Logistics
Job Type: Full-Time
Role Type: Clinical Leadership / Psychiatry / Medical Affairs / Partnerships
Ideal Experience Level: 5+ years of clinical experience, with 2+ years in leadership (includes residency)
Location: San Francisco
US Visa Sponsorship: Yes
🚀 The Opportunity
Legion is hiring a Chief Medical Officer to help make Legion one of the most trusted names in AI-native psychiatric care.
You will be the clinical voice of the company: building trust with patients, clinicians, payers, referral partners, regulators, and the broader medical community. You will help shape how Legion explains its model of care, how we earn confidence from the healthcare ecosystem, and how we build partnerships that expand access to fast, affordable, high-quality psychiatry.
This is a founding executive role for a psychiatrist who can operate externally and internally. You should be comfortable speaking with payers, health systems, primary care groups, referral partners, clinicians, and regulators, while also helping define the clinical standards that make those relationships durable.
The right person combines the clinical credibility of a leading psychiatrist, the partnership instincts of a healthcare executive, the trust-building judgment of a medical affairs leader, and the product curiosity required to help build AI-native care responsibly.
âś… Responsibilities and Deliverables
Serve as Legion’s senior clinical voice with payers, referral partners, health systems, regulators, advisors, provider groups, and the broader medical community.
Build trust in Legion’s model of AI-native psychiatry by clearly communicating how care is delivered, how clinicians remain involved, and how patient safety is protected.
Partner with the founders on payer, provider-referral, employer, health-system, and strategic partnership conversations.
Help shape Legion’s clinical brand: how we talk about psychiatry, AI, medication management, access, safety, outcomes, and patient trust.
Own Legion’s medical quality standards across psychiatric evaluation, medication management, documentation, follow-up, escalation, and patient outcomes.
Develop clinical protocols and care standards that make Legion easy for payers, PCPs, therapists, health systems, and other referral partners to trust.
Partner with product, engineering, data, clinical operations, and compliance to ensure Legion’s AI-enabled workflows are clinically sound, explainable, and responsibly governed.
Support referral growth by helping clinical partners understand when Legion is appropriate for their patients and how to refer with confidence.
Help build payer-facing and partner-facing clinical materials, including care model overviews, outcomes narratives, quality frameworks, and medical policies.
Recruit, mentor, and support psychiatrists, PMHNPs, supervising physicians, and future clinical leaders.
Represent Legion in high-stakes clinical conversations, including payer diligence, partner diligence, medical advisory discussions, and regulatory conversations.
🏆 You’ll Be Successful If You…
Make Legion trusted by clinicians, payers, referral partners, and patients.
Help Legion become known as one of the most clinically credible companies building AI-native psychiatry.
Open doors with payers, provider groups, health systems, and referral partners because they trust your judgment.
Translate complex psychiatry and AI-enabled care into language that feels clear, responsible, and medically serious.
Build the clinical confidence needed for PCPs, therapists, care teams, and health systems to refer patients to Legion.
Help payer and partnership conversations move faster because Legion’s care model is clinically legible and defensible.
Maintain high clinical standards while helping the company scale access, improve outcomes, and reduce friction for patients.
Build a clinical leadership system that supports quality without turning the company into a slow bureaucracy.
Help Legion earn the right to be a category-defining brand in psychiatric care.
đź§° Ideal Background and Skills
MD or DO with board certification in psychiatry. Child/adolescent psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, consultation-liaison psychiatry, medical informatics, or public psychiatry experience is a plus.
5+ years of clinical psychiatry experience, ideally including outpatient psychiatry, telepsychiatry, medication management, and clinically complex populations.
2+ years in a medical leadership role
Strong external presence with the ability to build trust with payers, referring clinicians, health systems, regulators, advisors, and clinical partners.
Experience supporting payer, provider, health-system, employer, or strategic partnership conversations.
Strong judgment around psychiatric prescribing, medication renewals, medication safety, risk stratification, escalation workflows, and documentation quality.
Experience supervising psychiatrists, PMHNPs, collaborating physicians, therapists, or multidisciplinary clinical teams.
Comfort turning clinical standards into partner-facing materials, payer-facing narratives, medical policies, and operational workflows.
Strong understanding of telehealth, multi-state clinical operations, CPOM, licensure, supervision models, HIPAA, state medical board expectations, and payer quality requirements.
Familiarity with measurement-based care, outcomes tracking, PHQ-9/GAD-7 workflows, safety planning, suicidality escalation, and evidence-based psychiatric care.
Ability to work cross-functionally with product, engineering, data, operations, legal, compliance, growth, partnerships, and founders.
High judgment around AI in clinical care. You do not need to be an engineer, but you should understand how to explain, govern, and responsibly scale AI-enabled clinical workflows.
Low ego, high ownership, and strong executive presence. You can speak with a payer in the morning, advise on a referral partnership at lunch, review a clinical protocol in the afternoon, and help founders make a hard judgment call by evening.
đź’° Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $180,000 – $375,000
Early-Stage Equity: Competitive
Health Insurance: Medical, dental, and vision benefits
Additional Perks: In-person retreats, meal stipends, clinical education budget, licensing/support budget, AI tooling budget
Time Off: Flexible, unlimited vacation policy
Work Hours: Flexible, with availability for high-stakes clinical or partnership moments when needed
Work Setup: Remote, with regular in-person founder/clinical/product sprints
Impact: Build clinical trust and medical credibility for the company building the future of psychiatry and medicine.
Autonomy and Learning: Own the clinical voice, medical trust, partnership credibility, and quality foundation for a category-defining healthcare company.
Growth Opportunities: As Legion scales, this role naturally grows into a Chief Medical Officer / Chief Clinical Officer role.
📝 How to Apply and Hiring Process
Apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/legionhealth/dc707b64-a289-4086-b775-ab8432b9a164
Overview of our hiring process:
Resume + Application Screen
Founder Interview
Clinical / Partnerships Scenario Deep Dive
Onsite Interview
Professional Reference Checks
Estimated time-to-hire: 2 weeks
Start date: ASAP
Hiring manager: Yash Patel
🤝 Equal Employment Opportunity
Legion Health is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees, contractors, and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply.