Head of Product

The role

Every new medicine that reaches a patient has passed through a clinical trial. For many of the people in those trials, it is not one option among many. It is the last one. The drug being tested is the thing standing between them and a disease that has run out of other answers.

And almost every one of those trials is still run the way it was decades ago: people reading hundred-page protocols by hand, then combing through site data line by line, hoping to catch the safety signal or the protocol deviation that matters before it becomes the thing that matters too much.

Nearly 90% of trials fail — and around 40% of those failures are not about the science at all. They are operational: the missed deviation, the data caught too late, the oversight that was always going to be too manual to hold.

That gap, between how much is at stake and how manual the oversight still is, is where patients lose their last chance and where good drugs get delayed or buried.

Espresso closes it. We read the protocol so a machine understands it, turn it into the risk indicators a trial should be watched against, and surface the deviations and safety signals that need a human, while filtering out the noise that doesn't. Clinical oversight that is risk-based in practice, not just on paper.

This is the other half of why we exist. AI has arrived as a genuinely new way of working — LLMs and agentic workflows that can read, reason, and act. Almost every industry is being rewritten by it. Clinical trials, where the cost of being wrong is highest and the tooling is oldest, are exactly where it is needed most and slowest to arrive. Espresso is bringing that era to clinical trials, carefully, on real data, in a domain where being right is regulated, audited, and non-negotiable.

This is not a dashboard company. We are building the intelligence layer for how trials are watched.

We Are Early

• Three design-partner sponsors

• A small and senior team

• Real data flowing

The person who joins now decides what Espresso becomes. We are looking for a Head of Product who can hold both the weight of the mission — lifesaving medicine reaching the people who have run out of time — and the craft of the moment, where the product is still being defined feature by feature.

What you'll do in year one

• Set the direction. Own the product vision and strategy. Define what Espresso is for clinical operations and quality teams, and hold the line on what it is not. Translate "make trial oversight safer and faster" into product principles that the whole team can build from. Make hard calls clearly, show your reasoning, and revisit them without ego when the evidence demands it.

• Be the voice of the customer (360). Our users are clinical research associates, medical monitors, data managers, and quality leads — people who carry real regulatory accountability. Deep empathy for how they actually work is the foundation of everything. Build the research and discovery loops, in close partnership with our design partners, that make customer insight a continuous input, not a quarterly survey.

• Deliver a solution, not a feature list. The product here is cross-functional. You will partner genuinely with engineering, AI, and go-to-market, and create the conditions where the best idea wins regardless of who has it, where decisions are made at the right level, and where the team's energy points at the same problem.

• Ship and learn. Run discovery. Form hypotheses. Define what good looks like before we build it, and how we will know if we got there. Drive decisions with evidence and judgment in equal measure, knowing when you have enough data to move and when shipping is the only way to find out. In our world, "what good looks like" also means defensible to an auditor, so quality is a product property, not a constraint bolted on later.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years in product management, with experience leading the product function.

• You have shipped online SaaS products end-to-end, ideally B2B or enterprise, and know what it takes to run a live multi-tenant product that customers depend on every day.

• You have built data-oriented products, where the value is in the data: getting it right, modeling it well, and turning it into something a user can trust and act on.

• You have shipped AI-powered products and understand what large language models can and cannot do. You make product bets accordingly, and you design for a model that is usually right rather than always right.

• You have built and led at an early stage. You make good decisions when the ground is moving, and the clean dataset does not yet exist.

• You are a builder. You get into the work: the spec, the prototype, the edge cases. You lead by example.

• You think in systems: states, edge cases, durable patterns versus one-time fixes that turn into debt.

• You are direct. You give feedback clearly, take it without defensiveness, and say "I don't know" without embarrassment.

• You can hold a high bar in a regulated environment without letting process smother momentum.

Bonus points

• Clinical knowledge is a big plus — hands-on experience with clinical trials, life sciences, or healthcare, or having built for clinical or regulatory users.

• Background in another domain where correctness is regulated (fintech, safety-critical systems).

• Experience working closely with ML or AI teams on model-driven products.

• Experience selling into or building for enterprise and institutional buyers (pharma sponsors, CROs), and an understanding of what it takes to win inside a quality and regulatory function.

What we offer

Espresso is building the AI risk-monitoring layer for clinical trials. We are a small, senior, motivated team — early enough that the work you do now defines the product, and serious enough that real sponsors trust us with real trial data. We move fast and we hold a high bar, because in this domain the bar is the product.

A note on fit: We are not looking for someone who has done this exact thing before. We are looking for someone built for this kind of problem — one that sits at the intersection of AI, patient safety, and an industry that has every reason to be careful. If making clinical trials safer and faster feels like the right problem for this moment in your career, reach out.