Founding Medical Leader, Psychiatry (backed by Y Combinator, $5M+ ARR, $20M+ raised)

Legion Health

$180K — $375K *
Healthcare
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • MD or DO with board certification in psychiatry.
  • 5+ years of clinical psychiatry experience, including outpatient and telepsychiatry.
  • 2+ years in a medical leadership role.
  • Experience with payer, provider, and health system partnerships.
  • Strong judgment around psychiatric care and documentation.

Responsibilities

  • Serve as senior clinical voice with external stakeholders including payers and health systems.
  • Build trust in AI-native psychiatry through clear communication.
  • Partner with founders on strategic conversations and partnerships.
  • Shape Legion's clinical brand surrounding safety and outcomes.
  • Develop and oversee medical quality standards across psychiatric care.
  • Support the recruitment and mentorship of clinical leaders and teams.

Benefits

  • Competitive equity opportunities for early-stage employees.
  • Comprehensive health insurance including medical, dental, and vision.
  • Flexible unlimited vacation policy to support work-life balance.
  • In-person retreats and professional development stipends.
  • Remote work setup with flexible hours accommodating clinical and partnership demands.
Full Job Description
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 Founding Medical Leader, Psychiatry 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.

• 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.


🧰 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.


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:
  • Overview of our hiring process:
    1. Resume + Application Screen
    2. Founder Interview
    3. Clinical / Partnerships Scenario Deep Dive
    4. Onsite Interview
    5. Professional Reference Checks
  • Estimated time-to-hire: 2 weeks
  • Start date: ASAP
  • Hiring manager: Yash Patel

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