Cedar

Cedar's remote culture emphasizes transparency, flexibility and inclusivity, fostering strong connections across our three workstyles. Our senior leadership team is dedicated to nurturing a culture of openness and connection through several initiatives.

Our CEO, Florian Otto, provides regular updates via a weekly CEO vlog to keep all Cedarians informed and aligned with company goals, partnerships and Cedarian happenings. Interactive town hall meetings highlight Cedarian achievements through what we call "Party Parrot recognitions," celebrating successes and building community.

We also ensure all Cedarians feel valued by providing various spaces for authentic engagement, from employee resource groups to regular manager touchpoints. This approach to inclusion helps cultivate a supportive environment where all Cedarians can thrive without feeling excluded for their social preferences, making inclusion truly well-rounded by accommodating the diverse ways individuals choose to interact and belong within our organization.

Remote hiring expands our reach to a broader talent pool, enabling us to attract individuals who share our values and bring diverse insights. We actively embrace the diverse expertise brought by our Cedarians throughout the United States. Their backgrounds enhance company culture, helping us achieve our goals.

Our strategy of remote hiring is a deliberate effort to reflect the variety of the patients we serve. This approach allows us to assemble a workforce that truly understands and represents our users' varied needs and experiences, which is essential for creating genuinely patient-centric solutions.

We also prioritize meaningful interactions within our team.

Cedar's commitment to my development empowered my transition from full-stack engineering to engineering leadership. Starting as an individual contributor, I had the opportunity to create a completely new product. Progressing from there, I assumed the role of tech lead, and later transitioned into a management position where I expanded my team into.

"Vibrant." Cedar's culture is vibrant. The billing experience in healthcare is rough.

Millions of Americans will agree. We have become used to customer experiences that are intuitive, relevant and simple thanks to companies like Netflix and Amazon. Cedar is working to create a similar experience in healthcare.

People looking to work for a mission-driven company solving real problems get excited about Cedar. Cedar has worked hard to build a world-class talent team. Our people come from many backgrounds.

We were raised in Utah, Singapore, Hawaii, California, Taiwan, Texas and other places. We have athletes, musical performers, dog rescuers, foodies, city and country "folk." Despite our differences, and because we're passionate about the work we're doing, we work hard to find people that can add to the vibrance here.

Our team recently met together in our New York City headquarters to solve problems and have some fun. This together time was extra special as multiple other teams — specifically many of our engineering and product teams — were also on site. Being together to collaborate in real life while enjoying pancakes made from scratch by our chief product officer was so valuable.

I've been with Cedar, via an acquisition and merger with OODA Health, since December 2018. Nearly six years. I was the sole recruiter at OODA Health for most of my time before the merger.

Shortly after joining Cedar, I had the opportunity to begin leading Talent for Makers — a segment specific to tech roles. Along with building an incredible team of recruiters and sourcers, I've been mentored by great people — both in talent acquisition and other parts of the business.

Beyond my growth as a people manager, my ability to utilize data has soared. Leveraging data to drive our recruiting strategies is a game changer. W.

Edwards Deming said, "Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." The movie Moneyball became so much more interesting to me. We use data to measure recruiting performance, anticipate start dates, identify trends and make other informed decisions.

We want to be the Peter Brands of recruiting. With progression from an individual contributor to a leader overseeing a productive and growing organization, Cedar has supported multiple components of my professional and personal growth. It's been incredible to have such a supportive team and environment that pushes us to continue progressing.

As an engineer in this ever-evolving technology industry, sharpening my engineering skills is a continuous and paramount endeavor. My personal learning routine involves a balanced combination of practical, hands-on exposure to real-world engineering challenges within my professional role and dedicated time each week for external learning after hours.

A key principle for me is maintaining a genuine interest in the topic at hand; motivation alone can only sustain learning to a certain extent before it is no longer perceived as relevant and engaging. To maintain this engagement, I often connect my learning objectives to a side project or task that provides real-time feedback and tangible outcomes as I am a very hands-on learner.

In addition to actively seeking out learning opportunities, I've found ways to integrate learning into my daily routine. For example, I've started using my commute time or the time I spend doing chores to listen to podcasts or audiobooks. This allows me to passively absorb information and learn new things even when I'm not actively reading.

Before embarking on any learning journey, I find it crucial to acknowledge and overcome the fear of venturing outside my comfort zone into the unknown. In today's era, the sheer volume of available information, both digital and physical, can be overwhelming and deter many from even starting.

I've learned from past experiences that the best recommended resources are often subjective; there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The key is to start somewhere and gradually, through the learning process, develop preferences and opinions that enable the identification of key concepts and valuable information sources for personal and professional growth.

My go-to resources include reading books — and I like to read them in various formats, whether that's physical copies, e-books or audiobooks — on subjects that pique my interest. Hacker News for staying up-to-date with industry news, GitHub for exploring code and trending projects and AI-powered tools like Perplexity to gather and synthesize information from diverse sources.

Of course, I also rely heavily on the internal resources at Cedar, like the meetings, forums, demos, programs and team initiatives.

Cedar is genuinely invested in the growth of each individual. Internal recurring sessions like the ASG (Architecture Steering Group) meetings, Tech Lead forums, Tech Talks and Engineering Demos have been invaluable for my growth. These open forums for discussion and knowledge-sharing broaden my perspective beyond my day-to-day work within a specific domain.

For instance, a recent engineering demo where a colleague showcased their use of GitHub Copilot and the resulting efficiency gains led me to adopt the tool and experience similar benefits. In addition to these recurring events, Cedar offers numerous other opportunities like hackathons, onsite meetings, a mentorship program and a partnership with Hone, all of which provide practical and interactive learning experiences that foster engineering growth.

Beyond the resources available to everyone, each team has the autonomy and encouragement to develop their own processes that promote collective learning. On top of regular retrospectives, teams have implemented various initiatives like book clubs and team tech talks to foster a culture of continuous learning.

Cedar's AI story is one that's familiar to all of us — the patients who face the nearly universal experience of receiving healthcare and managing what comes next: the bill. To deeply understand these needs, my team built a large language model-powered pipeline that transcribes and parses thousands of patient call recordings to gather the insights and data that fuel our AI voice agent, Kora.

Kora provides patients with comprehensive and compassionate medical billing support, delivering personalized guidance on everything from balance inquiries to payment options — even when patients can't fully articulate their problem. Our blog title would be: "The AI That Listens When You Don't Know What to Say.

" Healthcare billing is an area where users are often confused, anxious and unsure of the exact problem they are facing. It's why building AI for healthcare is different from typical consumer applications. Our patients aren't looking for a specific product code or a simple return process — they need guidance, diagnosis and a path to resolution.

One monumental moment occurred last year, when we released our AI chat assistant and were overwhelmed by positive feedback from the users of the product — call center agents who provided billing support to patients. We were excited to have the chance to speak with the call center agents during our over-the-shoulder sessions, where we observed how these individuals were using our new AI tools to supercharge their workflows.

We knew that we had something special when an agent exclaimed, "That's exactly what we need. I couldn't have said it better myself!" upon seeing an AI-generated suggestion to a patient inquiry.

The qualitative feedback from call center agents and patients, along with the numbers that illustrated the efficiency gains brought by our solution, gave us the conviction we needed to double down on Cedar's AI investment and make AI central to how we solve patient problems.

Experience is helpful, but we also value persistence, creativity and problem-solving. Our strong team of applied AI scientists not only have deep expertise in AI, but many of them also have exposure to different aspects of healthcare billing, such as insurance claims data.

That knowledge, paired with a drive to solve complex problems for patients and clients, is invaluable. We also welcomed a PhD fellow earlier this year, recognizing the importance of fresh perspectives. We're also now hiring for a staff applied AI scientist.

What sets our team apart is our commitment to learning and collaboration. In our recent prompt tuning retro, we reflected on our experimentation process, surfaced insights and pain points, and outlined action items around tooling, workflows and architecture exploration.

Our weekly brainstorms are another cornerstone — providing space to share ideas and feedback at every stage, from experiment design to results review. This spirit of collaboration is what drives us to solve healthcare's toughest AI challenges.