Customer Strategy & Ops - New Grad

Introduction

Hi, I'm Al https://www.linkedin.com/in/al-stolz/ and I lead Customer Operations at Candid. As a team, we’re primarily responsible for delivering valuable outcomes with and for our customers. Prior to Candid, I led teams at McKinsey & Co for 5 years, based in both NYC and Sydney, Australia. I started my career as an M&A lawyer at Allens, a top Australian law firm.

We’re hiring for outstanding folks on my team, and I want to tell you a bit about how we think about this role, because it's different from what you'll find at most companies - and that difference is very intentional.

At Candid, our model is one where a single, empowered individual is responsible for delivering outcomes with and for customers. Our internal name for this role is “Valkyrie” and it originally evolved out of necessity. In the early days of Candid, as with many startups, it was impossible to have separate people owning all the things required to help customers win; one person had to integrate across all of it. What we found is that this isn’t just a startup constraint - it is an incredibly effective way to organize ourselves. A single, empowered owner who can move fluidly across functional boundaries will outperform a team of specialists nearly every time, especially in a domain as complex and fragmented as revenue cycle management.

As we've scaled to ~200 people, we've intentionally preserved that model. We've split off certain functionally specialized supporting teams - such as Customer Support, Implementation, Forward Deployed Engineering, and Training & Enablement - but the Valkyrie remains the single-point owner of customer outcomes. The anti-pattern we actively resist is the substance-light CSM role that's mostly about relationship management and renewal motions. To be effective at Candid, you have to be willing and able to operate at the lowest tactical level - iterating on prompts for agent phone calls to navigate payer IVRs, debugging detailed syntax errors in EDI rejections with a clearinghouse, mapping hundreds of fields between a legacy system and ours - and then zoom out to shape the strategic direction of an account. Some might describe that work as unglamorous, but the best people on this team relish doing it, because that's where the valuable outcomes live.

The shape of person who thrives here tends to be a low-ego, high-slope generalist. They are resourceful, laser-focused on value delivery, and wired to expand into unowned space rather than wait for scope to be handed to them. This is not a role where your responsibilities are neatly defined and bounded. Valkyries see what needs to happen and make it happen, often before anyone asks. When you spot a gap between teams, an unowned customer problem, or an emerging product opportunity, the expectation is that you move toward it.

That bet - that a scrappy, resourceful generalist given space and expansive ownership will outperform a specialist - has paid off at every stage of Candid's growth. I'm looking for people who will keep proving it right.

The Role - New Graduate Customer Strategy and Operations

Candid Health is hiring multiple New Graduate Customer Strategy & Operations team members to join our team in 2027. This is a new grad role — we're looking for sharp, driven people coming out of top undergraduate programs who want real ownership over real outcomes from day one.

We're fixing one of the most broken and expensive parts of US healthcare: medical billing. Healthcare providers spend over $280B a year on administrative overhead just to get paid by insurance. We're building software backed by best-in-class data science and AI to automate that complexity so providers get paid more, faster, and with less effort. We were in Y Combinator (W20) and are backed by Sixth Street, Oak HC/FT, 8VC, and First Round Capital.

In this role, you will have the opportunity to work across the customer life-cycle. You'll own a portfolio of healthcare provider customers and be responsible for their success on the Candid platform. That means digging into claims data to root-cause problems, leading implementations from contract to go-live, building processes that scale, and partnering with our engineering and product teams to turn customer pain points into product features and AI-powered automations. You'll work cross-functionally with nearly every team at Candid — RCM, Support, Product, Design, Engineering, and Sales — and you'll be the voice of the customer inside the building.

This is not a rotational program where you observe for a year. You will have customers, metrics, and outcomes that are yours. But you won't be thrown in alone, you'll be mentored by experienced operators and leaders who have built this function from scratch, and you'll join a cohort of other new grads going through the same ramp together. Our talent comes from top companies (e.g., MBB, Lyft, Palantir, Amazon, Investment Banking) and you will get their mentorship and you'll ramp alongside a cohort of other new grads who are just as driven as you are. We invest heavily in developing our people because the problems we're solving require it, and because we want Candid to be the place that launched your career.

Examples of What You'll Do

- Own a portfolio of customer accounts and drive their retention, expansion, and success on the Candid platform

- Dig into claims data to identify why denials are happening, where revenue is leaking, and what needs to change, then build the action plan and execute it

- Lead end-to-end implementations for new customers: map their workflows, configure the platform, coordinate across internal teams, and get them live

- Partner with Product and Forward Deployed Engineering to translate recurring customer problems into product features, workflow automations, and AI agents

- Communicate directly with customers, on calls, in writing, and in person, as their primary strategic partner at Candid

- Build and document processes that don't exist yet: SOPs, templates, playbooks, and systems that let this team scale

- Work cross-functionally every day with RCM, Customer Support, Product, Design, Engineering, and Sales

- Identify opportunities to automate manual workflows using AI tools and advocate for building them into the product

Who You Are

- You are graduating either fall 2026 or Spring 2027 (or recently graduated) with a Bachelor's degree from a top undergraduate program

- You have a track record of owning outcomes, not just completing assignments: in internships, research, clubs, athletics, your own business, or food service work

- You're analytical: you are excited about data and drawing insights from data

- You're a builder: when you see a broken process, your instinct is to fix the system, not work around it

- You communicate clearly and concisely in writing, on calls, and in a room full of people who know more than you

- You're coachable: you actively seek feedback, are introspective, and make changes

- You have grit: you've done hard things and didn't quit when they got uncomfortable: competitive athletics, demanding coursework, a job, starting something from scratch

- You're excited about AI and comfortable using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot to move faster and build things

- Healthcare experience is a plus but not required, what matters is curiosity and the drive to learn

Example Majors We Love, Not Required

Computer Science, Economics, Pre-Med (Human Biology, Biology, Neuroscience), Healthcare Management, Public Policy, Global Health, Finance, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Statistics, Applied Math, Systems Engineering, Data Science, Finance, Entrepreneurship

Why Candid

- Real ownership from day one. You'll have customers, metrics, and deliverables that are yours

- Mentorship built in. You'll be coached by experienced leaders who have built this team from the ground up, and you'll ramp alongside a cohort of other new grads

- Shape the product. Your customer insights directly inform what our engineering team builds next including AI agents and automations

- Work that matters. We help healthcare providers treat opioid addiction, expand access to mental health care, support women's health, and more. The billing problem we solve is the thing standing between providers and patients

- World-class team and backers. YC W20, Sixth Street, Oak HC/FT, 8VC, First Round Capital. You'll work alongside people from McKinsey, Palantir, Lyft and other top companies

- Compensation: $90,000-$120,000 base salary + equity with meaningful upside given Candid's growth stage

- Location: Denver, San Francisco, or New York — 4 days in-office, 1 day remote. Travel up to 25% is possible.