People & Culture Program Manager

About the Role

Hippocratic AI was built on a single, uncompromising idea: Do No Harm. As we scale, our challenge is to make sure the values that got us here are not diluted — that the way we hire, evaluate, and develop people reflects who we actually are and who we intend to remain.

The People & Culture Program Manager is a senior individual contributor who owns that challenge. This is not a recruiting role and not a generalist HR role. It is a culture-architecture role: you will take our five published leadership principles and embed them into the systems that shape our people — our hiring process and our performance and review process — and stand up a listening engine that tells us, honestly, whether our culture is real in practice.

Our leadership principles are already defined and public:

• Do No Harm — our AI products must be as safe as an average human performing the same task.

• Patients First — the number one priority is improving patients’ health outcomes.

• Equal Access for All — all members of society should have equal access to healthcare.

• Creativity — creativity solves healthcare’s greatest challenges, and is best encouraged in a five-days-a-week in-person environment (except go-to-market teams).

• Humanity — patients are treated as whole individuals, and the best workplace is one where everyone knows each other personally, not just as colleagues.

Your work is to make these principles operational and durable — lived in how we hire, evaluate, and develop people — and to steward and sharpen their language as the company grows.

Critically, this role carries no direct reports and no line authority over the teams it influences. Your impact will come from credibility, well-built frameworks, and trusted relationships across the company — not from org-chart control. The ability to move interviewing and leadership teams you do not manage is the defining competency of this role.

What You’ll Own

1. Steward and operationalize our leadership principles

Our five principles — Do No Harm, Patients First, Equal Access for All, Creativity, and Humanity — already exist. Your job is to make them real: translate each from a statement of belief into observable behaviors and decision criteria the company can actually hire and evaluate against. You will partner with founders and senior leaders to keep the language sharp, resolve ambiguity as we scale, and ensure the principles stay authentically ours rather than drifting into wall-art. This foundational translation work underpins everything below.

1. Infuse the principles throughout hiring

Translate the leadership principles into a concrete, repeatable interview process: structured rubrics, calibrated interviewer guidance, a bar-raiser-style mechanism, and disciplined debriefs. You will train and influence interviewing teams — whom you do not manage — to assess candidates against our principles consistently and fairly, so that what we say we value and what we actually screen for are the same thing. This includes making concrete expectations legible to candidates up front — for example, our in-person Creativity expectation — so the right people self-select in.

1. Infuse the principles throughout performance and review

Wire the same principles into how people are evaluated, recognized, and promoted. By closing the loop between what we hire for and what we reward, you ensure our culture compounds rather than erodes as we grow. You will work with leaders across the org to make the principles legible in review criteria, promotion standards, and feedback norms.

1. Drive the “Voice of Hippocratic AI” process

Stand up and run a listening engine — surveys, sensing sessions, focus groups, and other feedback mechanisms — that measures whether our culture is genuinely felt by employees. You will turn that signal into insight, surface it to leadership candidly, and help drive the changes it points to.

A Note on How We Define Culture

We hire for culture add, not culture conformity. This role is explicitly responsible for protecting against affinity bias and homogeneity in our process — designing principle-based assessment that strengthens our culture while expanding the range of perspectives, backgrounds, and working styles on our teams. Building a high-integrity, principle-driven, and diverse company is a single objective here, not a tradeoff.

What You’ll Bring

• Influence without authority. A demonstrated track record of moving teams, leaders, and processes you did not formally own — through credibility, frameworks, and relationships.

• Culture and values architecture. Experience operationalizing existing values or leadership principles — turning belief statements into observable, assessable behaviors — ideally during a period of growth.

• Hiring-systems depth. Fluency in structured interviewing, rubric design, interviewer calibration, and debrief discipline — and how to roll these out at scale.

• Performance and review fluency. Understanding of how evaluation, promotion, and feedback systems shape behavior, and how to embed values into them.

• Listening and insight. Ability to design employee-listening mechanisms and translate qualitative and quantitative signal into action.

• Bias-aware design. A sophisticated, current understanding of culture-add hiring and how to mitigate affinity bias in selection and evaluation.

• Judgment and discretion. Comfort working closely with founders and senior leaders on sensitive, high-trust work, and delivering candid feedback upward.

• Mission alignment. Genuine resonance with a safety-first, “Do No Harm” mission in healthcare AI.

What Success Looks Like

• Our five principles translated into clear, observable criteria that leaders and interviewers recognize and use — not just words on a page.

• Interviewing teams applying those principles consistently, with measurably better calibration and fairer, more reliable hiring decisions.

• Performance and promotion processes that visibly reflect the same principles we hire against.

• A functioning Voice of Hippocratic AI process producing trusted signal that leadership acts on.

A Note on In-Person Collaboration

We believe the best work happens together, in the same room. Our Creativity principle holds that solving healthcare's hardest problems requires a five-days-a-week, in-person environment — and our Humanity principle holds that the best workplace is one where colleagues know each other personally, not just professionally. Neither of those is possible over video calls alone.

This role is based full-time at our Menlo Park headquarters, five days a week. Given that this position's entire mode of impact is influence — building trust with founders, calibrating interviewing teams, and reading the true signal beneath a survey response — the informal, hallway-level relationship-building that only happens in person isn't a nice-to-have here. It's the mechanism.

Basic (Core Requirements)

• Bachelor's Degree required

• 8+ years of experience in Program Management within People/HR organizations

• Demonstrated experience influencing without authority — a track record of moving teams, leaders, and processes you didn't formally own, through credibility and relationship-building rather than org-chart power (called out as "the defining competency of this role")

• Experience operationalizing values or leadership principles — turning abstract belief statements into observable, assessable behaviors, ideally in a fast-growth company

• Structured interviewing fluency — rubric design, interviewer calibration, bar-raiser mechanisms, and debrief discipline, and knowing how to scale these

• Understanding of performance/promotion systems — how evaluation, feedback, and promotion processes shape behavior, and how to embed values into them

• Ability to design employee-listening programs (surveys, sensing sessions, focus groups) and convert that signal into action leadership will actually use

• Judgment and discretion for high-trust work directly with founders/senior leaders, including delivering candid upward feedback

• Genuine mission alignment with a safety-first "Do No Harm" healthcare AI mission

Preferred (Strengthens Candidacy)

• A current, sophisticated grasp of culture-add vs. culture-fit hiring and concrete methods for mitigating affinity bias in selection and evaluation

• Prior experience specifically translating principles across both hiring AND performance/review systems (not just one)

• Experience in an organization of comparable scale/growth stage to Hippocratic AI's current stage

• Comfort operating with no direct reports or line authority — candidates who've thrived in similarly structural, staff-level IC roles will likely map best here