Why I joined Fathom: Jacob Hoffman

From time to time, Fathom invites recent hires to share about their experience in deciding to join our team. In this blog, Jacob Hoffman, Senior Software Engineer, tells the story of his decision to join Fathom to grow technically while solving important healthcare problems.

After over four years working on neural decoding and surgical robots at Neuralink, I decided it was time to look for my next challenge. The job search was overwhelming at times – there are an endless number of exciting companies to work for, after all! What was I looking for and why did I think Fathom was the right fit for me?

Solving important and tractable problems

Working at the intersection of healthcare and technology is where I have had the most fun and felt the most fulfilled in my career. Fathom's product sits squarely at this intersection by reducing inefficiencies in health systems' revenue cycle management operations. When I decided to join this company, I was excited to learn about and make an impact on a whole new part of the healthcare industry that I had never been exposed to before.

Perhaps the biggest draw to Fathom for me was how the product makes a lot of sense from both a technical and business perspective. When you get down to it, automated medical coding is a multi-label classification problem, which is something modern natural language processing systems are very good at (and they are constantly getting better).

On the business side, the need for automation is very clear – human medical coders are in short supply, are expensive, and code much more slowly than machines can. Fathom presented a cogent vision for how continued technological progress will spur business development. This vision was very exciting to me while I was interviewing and it continues to motivate me today.

Growth opportunities

It's an exciting time to join Fathom — we are fresh off of raising our Series B and are focusing intensely on scaling both our product and engineering teams! When I was looking for my next role, it was important to me that I join a company where I had ample room to grow both technically and as a leader. So far, Fathom has proven to be an excellent place for both! Engineers at Fathom are encouraged to work across our product stack, which has made it a rich environment to gain both technical breadth and depth.

Our engineering roadmap is filled with challenging and impactful problems. If you resonate with anything I've talked about above, please consider joining our team!