Gradient AI

As a company that was just beginning its journey shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, we didn't have much of a choice but to hire remotely in the early days. However, we quickly embraced the benefits of a remote-first approach. Hiring without geographic limitations allowed us to focus on bringing in the best talent, wherever they lived, rather than being constrained to a single market.

One of the most immediate challenges was the lack of face-to-face interaction. To help bridge that gap, we implemented a camera-on culture for collaborative moments, which has allowed us to better connect with our remote teammates and build stronger relationships across the organization.

Over time, building a remote-heavy organization has helped us foster a culture of trust, autonomy and flexibility. Our teams operate with a high degree of ownership and we've been intentional about giving Gradiators the space and support to work in the ways that enable them to be most successful.

Our team stays connected by relying on a combination of Slack for day-to-day messaging and Microsoft Teams for video meetings and real-time collaboration. Within Slack, we use a variety of channels to keep everyone informed — from company-wide updates to team-specific conversations.

We've also created several channels that help build connections beyond work. For example, we have a pets channel (#tails-of-joy), a space to share what we're doing outside of work (#off-the-clock) and a general catch-all channel for anything fun or random (#random).

While we don't require cameras to be on for every meeting, we do encourage people to turn them on during collaborative discussions or connection-focused moments. It helps us bridge the gap of remote work and creates a stronger sense of presence and team cohesion.

We're intentional about creating moments of connection in a remote-first environment. Each month, we host a company-wide meeting where we encourage cameras on and kick things off with a fun icebreaker or question prompt to get the conversation flowing.

We've also introduced weekly "water cooler questions" in our #random Slack channel every Wednesday. They're light, sometimes unexpected and have sparked great cross-team conversations — it's been a simple but effective way to help people get to know each other beyond their day-to-day work.

Additionally, we run regular engagement surveys to understand what's resonating with the team and where we can improve. These touchpoints help us stay connected, keep a pulse on culture and continue building an inclusive, engaged environment.

This year, we introduced "recharge days" — dedicated days off for all staff to take a break from work. We understand how hard our employees have been working, and we want to ensure their efforts don't go unnoticed. We've offered extended weekends during the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and we're excited to continue this practice during the upcoming holiday season.

Our goal is to give everyone the opportunity to fully relax and recharge, so they can return to work feeling refreshed and energized.

Providing recharge days is crucial for fostering a healthy work-life balance. By actively prioritizing time off and supporting mental health, we're helping our team avoid burnout and maintain long-term productivity and engagement. This approach also reinforces that we value our employees as individuals, not just for their work output, creating a culture of trust and well-being.

The feedback we've received has been overwhelmingly positive. Many employees have expressed how much they appreciate the recharge days. One team member shared that the extra time off allowed them to take a much-needed break and reconnect with family, which made a noticeable difference in their focus and motivation upon returning to work.

Another employee mentioned that having long weekends throughout the year has helped them manage stress better and maintain a more consistent work-life balance. Overall, the recharge days have not only helped to reduce burnout but have also increased employee satisfaction and engagement.

I love being part of an engineering team that has a culture of viewing questions as opportunities to teach and learn. At Gradient AI, I'm always inspired to take on new personal and technical challenges.

The industrial revolution marked a turning point in history by automating the physical labor of the human body. Today, we are experiencing a similarly transformative shift — the AI revolution — which is the automation of the mind. Roughly three years ago, I began to truly understand the magnitude of AI and the profound impact it would have across industries and societies globally.

From that moment on, I felt a deep desire to contribute to this new frontier. That passion led me to Gradient AI, a company that stands at the leading edge of innovation in the healthcare and insurance sectors. It's genuinely a privilege to be part of a team working on cutting-edge technologies that have the potential to change lives.

More importantly, I'm surrounded by passionate, talented and driven individuals who inspire me daily. The combination of meaningful work, advanced tech and incredible people makes Gradient AI a dream job for me.

Once I identified the field that I wanted to be part of — AI — I became intentional about how to break into it. I started by seeking out individuals who were already doing the kind of work I aspired to do. I asked them to mentor me.

Over time, I've had the opportunity to learn from some incredibly brilliant people who generously allowed me to work closely with them. I studied them, observed their habits, learned their thought processes and asked questions constantly. But I want to emphasize something important: these opportunities didn't just fall into my lap.

Mentorship was rarely offered to me — I had to go out and ask for it. My advice to anyone looking to grow in their career is this: proactively seek mentors who are in the field you want to enter or who exhibit the qualities and attributes you want to develop in yourself.

Learn from them intentionally.

I live by a personal philosophy that applies to both life and career: "Let life happen for you, not to you." I don't wait for opportunities — I create them. I keep a clear vision: I want to be a chief technology officer one day.

From there, I plan backwards. It's really that straightforward. As a software engineer, I knew I didn't want to remain static—I wanted to grow into leadership.

So I asked: What competencies, traits and experiences would I need to qualify as a leader? Then, I worked on developing them. I read leadership books, studied management styles, and took every opportunity — professionally and personally — to practice being the kind of leader I aspire to be.

My time in the army also provided a platform to refine those skills. When I chose to enter the AI industry, I applied the same approach. I realized most leadership roles required industry experience and often a master's degree, so I pursued a master's in computer science while working full time and earned certifications in machine learning to build my skills and credibility.

My principle is simple: envision your goal, research the path, plan to bridge the gap, and execute with consistency.

I am excited to share that our continued growth has presented opportunities for us to provide a new line of consulting services to our clients, which led to my promotion as a health consultant. As a SaaS company, we strive to create software that our clients can interact with on their own time after they've been properly trained and given the tools to do so.

However, when the software provided is industry-leading AI modeling for health and property and casualty insurers, the complexity of individual use cases can quickly multiply. As we continued to grow, we reevaluated how we package and provide our software, which led us to create our new managed services team.

In this newly created managed services team, we can position ourselves to proactively provide consulting services to clients who may need extra resources to ensure they're reaping the full value of what we can offer.

Since joining Gradient AI, knowledge of our models and client communication have been cornerstones of what I need to excel in servicing our clients. These are skills that I enjoy, but as someone who has spent almost all their professional career in some sort of consulting capacity in the health industry, I have always looked for new ways our clients can interact with our models.

I believe this love of connecting with clients on a more granular level led me to my new role as a health consultant. In this role, I am excited to expand upon the versatility that our AI modeling can provide our clients in a consultative manner. For example, on a given day, I could meet with three different clients who are all purchasing the same AI model, but each client comes from a different vertical and stage in the employer healthcare purchasing lifecycle.

By leveraging the skills and knowledge that I've learned over my career, I am excited to be able to provide tailored, consultative services that leverage my experience to influence how our clients interact and ingest our model's outputs.

Gradient AI is the first fully remote job that I've held in my career, so collaborating with other teams and senior leadership via Slack, emails and Zoom meetings required an adjustment. I initially feared I wouldn't be given opportunities to share my ideas; however, upon my first week, I came to find out that we had standing meetings with team leads and often senior leadership.

Now, just because there were standing meetings didn't mean internal mobility and upskilling were a given, but the opportunities were there, which is all an individual with initiative needs. Speaking from my own experience, I felt that a particular client vertical of ours could grow more rapidly if we reformatted and presented our outputs in a way that differed from our standard.

After voicing my ideas, I soon found out that I wasn't the only one who felt that way and was allowed to formally present my ideas. Fast forward to today, it may not be the direct cause, but I believe that by seizing the opportunities that Gradient AI consciously provides their employees to learn from each other, I was able to showcase my initiative, which I believe ultimately led to my new role.

We foster a culture of learning by anchoring our work in a bold shared vision. When the path forward challenges us, it sparks growth and encourages each team member to develop new skills, adopt better approaches and rise to meet the moment. Ambitious goals act as a catalyst, pushing us beyond what is comfortable and into new territory.

In contrast, when the vision is small or the demands too familiar, it is easy to stay still. But with a clear and inspiring vision, we build collective momentum as we embrace the discomfort that comes with learning and transforming together.

A strong vision acts as a forcing function. It sparks movement, shared ownership and momentum. It gives teams clear direction, aligns incentives and creates an environment where learning and growth happen naturally.

When someone learns and shares a better pattern, the whole team benefits. Over time, this builds a virtuous cycle that continuously accelerates progress. Take our legacy API.

It was generating revenue but was flawed, fire-prone and hard to maintain. The team was talented and staffed, but progress was stalled. What changed?

We introduced a bold, company aligned vision: Scale the API and make it foundational for new products. That shift created urgency and clarity. We quickly mobilized to redesign the API and, in the process, introduced major improvements — better patterns, updated processes and modern architecture.

These changes happened not because someone mandated them but because the vision made them obvious and exciting. The result? A better API, stronger team momentum and a culture of growth fueled by purpose.

First, there will always be tradeoffs between product needs and engineering health. But if you consistently prioritize business goals at the cost of engineering well-being, morale will suffer. Cast a vision that includes building excellent systems and processes.

Make space for best practices and time to implement them, so engineers can grow by working on and owning increasingly better technical solutions. Second, if senior leadership is not providing a strong vision, you still need to create and push one. You will eventually need leadership to support it, but you cannot wait for them to go first.

Their attention is often pulled in many directions, and they rely on your initiative to surface opportunities, identify gaps and keep momentum alive. That momentum is what drives learning, adoption of better patterns and team growth. Your vision can be the spark that unlocks long-term progress.

"In my experience, Gradient AI has facilitated meaningful professional development by trusting and equipping in equal measure, that's the truth. I consider myself lucky to grow and thrive as part of a team that is doing the very same.".

Gradient AI supports work-life balance by letting local employees choose whether they want to work from home or come into the office. We can work remotely from anywhere in the US & adjust our schedules to accommodate life outside of work. Additionally, unlimited PTO, which allows us to travel, see family, & do things we enjoy is the cherry on top!

The product team at Gradient gathers feedback throughout the customer lifecycle. Product is brought into select pre-sales engagements when the sale relates to a new feature or product. We get involved with ongoing customer support alongside the customer service team to understand how customers are getting value out of our products and how they might benefit from improvements or changes.

We engage in customer interviews and product-led quarterly business reviews to maintain the feedback cycle for all customers.

Customer feedback is the primary source of all product development at Gradient. Each new product or feature is initiated from feedback we hear from current or prospective customers. The cycle then begins with a voice-of-customer and market feedback exercise before any requirements are put in writing.

This process ensures that we are building features that will benefit our customers and helps us be as efficient as possible with our team's time.

The biggest lesson we learned is to be sure to get feedback from as many potential users as possible before committing to new work. As a startup, it is tempting to try to prioritize requests from each customer in an attempt to make everyone happy. The reality is that the best approach to making everyone happy is to build products that everyone will love and that starts with getting feedback from as many customers as possible.

A 50 percent year-over-year increase in the volume moving through our platform. In other words, we're seeing significantly more cases and data flowing through our solution than last year. This is one of the clearest indicators of our overall strength; it shows strong user adoption, confirms that customers are finding real value, and demonstrates that our platform can scale as demand grows.

Our biggest competitive strength is SAIL, our industry-leading health risk prediction model. Its accuracy and the quality of the insights it provides truly set us apart. Our rapid growth and customer adoption are strong proof of that differentiation.

I'm most excited about expanding how our actionable risk-identification capabilities are used across healthcare. We're evolving from a single point solution into a fully integrated platform that helps risk-bearing organizations, like health insurers, identify and manage risk across the entire member lifecycle.