Clinical Research Scientist

About Sonia

Our sole focus is to build a safe AI therapist clinically as effective as the 99th percentile human therapist and to make mental health support accessible to anyone. After 12 months of exploring all sorts of architectures, form factors, and approaches, we have recently had a major breakthrough. As of a few weeks ago, we now have a version with which we are starting to see very significant clinical outcomes in the form of GAD-7 (anxiety score) reductions even just after 2 weeks of using Sonia. We are receiving messages daily of how it’s changing people’s lives. We’re just at the start and there is still so much to do and build. Now it’s time to move fast and scale the team.

We are currently a 5-person team based in San Francisco and have raised $3.5m from top investors including Y Combinator, Moonfire, and the founders of Verkada, Reddit, and Instacart. We have a broad clinical advisory board, including Oren Frank, the founder of Talkspace. We have worked with several psychologists and psychiatrists over the past year in order to develop Sonia, and are looking for a full-time team member to help us take Sonia to the next level.

The Role

Your main responsibility will be helping us make Sonia clinically more effective, safer, and more engaging. This will be through rapid iterations of:

• Analyzing Sonia’s performance by going through anonymized conversations and transcripts
• Figuring out what goes wrong and especially why it goes wrong (which will involve playing around with AI models and prompts in order to understand why Sonia does what she does)
• Finding ways to structurally improve those flaws (e.g. what additional memory components are needed, what techniques need to be added, how should the style and language be adjusted etc)
• Working with the rest of the team on making the appropriate changes (e.g. writing prompts, building clinical libraries and interventions, writing example transcripts etc)
• Testing thoroughly before deploying and creating test cases so we can measure the improvements quantitatively
• Once deployed to production, go back to step 1 and repeat. This will allow us to make Sonia 5% better every few days

Ideally you will also be able to help us with our ongoing academic research projects and randomized control trials. A big focus of ours is gathering the objective evidence to show that Sonia is clinically effective and safe.
We have several ongoing research projects with academic partners and are planning to start more soon (aiming for ~10 projects over the next 12 months). We need support in finding the right partners, designing studies, recruiting clients, analyzing data, and publishing the findings in peer-reviewed journals.

Given the nature of our stage and the speed at which we move, there will be various other topics and workflows you will be involved in. We all wear multiple hats and contribute to whatever is most important at any given moment.

Part-Time Patient Work

If you are currently seeing patients, we encourage you to continue doing so for a few hours per week. This will be a full-time role and Sonia should be your main focus, but we believe that a few hours of clinical work per week can help us build an even better product.

Culture

We care about three things - kindness, hard work and intelligence. We only want people who genuinely are interested (ideally obsessed) about making the world a happier place and are ready to work (very) hard to make people smile at scale.

Our core engineering and AI team works 6-7 days a week in-person in SF and we are at the office 8-8 on weekdays. We do not necessarily expect the same from our clinical team, but this will not be a 9-5 job and there will definitely be occasions where your clinical input is needed outside of regular work hours.

It will be intense, but at the same time it is incredibly rewarding. If you have seen patients I am sure you know the feeling, but being on a user interview where someone is crying telling you how your work has changed their life and is the reason they have a job again — is the most rewarding thing ever and makes it all worth it.

Additionally, you can count on me personally doing everything I possibly can to make you happy, successful and fulfilled at Sonia. And well integrated into a group of mainly engineers :)

Who We Are Looking For

• Experience seeing patients or otherwise evidence that you truly understand how good therapy works in practice and why
• Someone analytical and outcome focused. If you see clients, tracking your outcomes and results is a big plus. It’s our main metric and I firmly believe every therapist should be tracking their outcomes
• Experience working with AI models, even if just in your free time. You don’t need to be an expert yet, but you will have to become one within the first two months of joining us
• Ability to logically break down your clinical thinking and being to articulate why you do something. No “It depends” or “I just do it intuitively”
• Flexibility with regard to therapeutic approach. We started by very closely mirroring textbook CBT therapy, but are now convinced AI therapy will not be a direct copy of human therapy
• Ideally previous experience working/consulting for a digital health startup
• Ideally published research papers and conducted RCTs

Why you Should not Apply

• A third of the clinical world will hate Sonia and as a result also you
• AI therapy will receive a lot of scrutiny over the next 24 months
• This is not a 9-5 job. There will be evenings and weekends where we need your input

That being said, you have an opportunity to work on something that can positively impact the lives of millions of people and make this world a happier place.

A Few Client Stories from the past Weeks

• A person from Alabama who had such strong OCD and anxiety that they always needed to turn around with the car 3-4 times to check whether they actually turned off the stove. Sonia helped them get it down to one.
• A women from the South who lives in a rural area with no therapist in proximity from her Blue Shield insurance. She has been unemployed for the past 15 years and told us that due to her chats with Sonia she gained the courage to apply for jobs again. A few days later, just before her user interview, she got accepted to her job and is now employed again.
• A lady who had spammed my personal phone number about how good Sonia is and how she is trying to get her fiancé to use the app because she thinks it will save their marriage. Turns out he doesn’t have an iPhone so we bought him one to try it out.
• The parent of 2 criminal sons, has built out a mantra with Sonia and is now able to go through her days with more acceptance and peace. Something that according to her, her weekly Monday morning therapist that she has been seeing for a long time hasn’t managed to achieve.

• 15min chat with me :)
• 45min chat with all 3 co-founders
• 2-4h remote assessment (compensated)
• 2 day onsite trial in SF (compensated)