Assembling a World-Class Engineering Leadership Team
Hinge Health has spent the last years building one of the strongest engineering teams in digital health. The next chapter is more ambitious: an engineering organization that holds its own against the best companies in tech. That ambition starts with leadership.
Over the past several months I've personally hired four senior engineering leaders, drawn collectively from Pinterest, Netflix, Meta, Uber, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Coupang, and Nextdoor. Track records like that mattered, but they weren't what tipped the decisions. We hired leaders who still build with their hands, treat AI as core craft, and chose our mission deliberately.
These four senior hires represent a broader leadership shift, in addition to upleveling our engineering org from within with three internal director-level promotions.
They've excelled where average is already great
We hired specifically for leaders who stood out even in organizations that demand excellence. All four built long careers inside high-bar companies, earning fast promotions. None of them moved early or moved often.
Felix spent 6 years at Amazon and 7 at LinkedIn, going from Software Engineer I to Director in 9 years. Yixue spent 7 years at Pinterest and 6 at Coupang; she went from college graduate to manager of managers at Pinterest in 5 years, during the IPO run. Mark spent 5 years each at Dropbox and Uber, and was leading a 50-person team 7 years out of college through the Dropbox IPO. Sagar joined Netflix as employee #100 and grew with the company for 13 years, then spent another 5.5 at Meta.
I led all of these searches personally, over more than six months. The goal was to get them right, not to fill roles.
Hands-on, AI-native leaders
They lead from the code. Three of the four have started so far, and all three shipped production code in their first two weeks at Hinge Health. In her first week, Yixue opened 8 PRs into our exercise therapy service, timed how long they took to review, and used the data to propose process changes. Felix is personally opening PRs across his org. Pretty much the only growth area to surface from Sagar's interviews was being "sometimes too hands-on" at Meta, exactly the kind of problem we'd rather inherit. Mark is diving into PR reviews on day 2. None of them stopped writing code when they became senior.
They build with AI in their own workflow. By her second week, Yixue had built a personal suite of 20+ skills, subagents, and cron orchestrations that automate her ticket-to-merge loop end-to-end, including addressing reviewer feedback. Felix is running a "zero manually written code" challenge in his org that hit 87% completion in a single week. Before joining, Mark's own hackathon project turned into an AI copilot for experiment design at Uber that cut partner-team time-to-market by 30–40%. Sagar shared the single best-organized framework for how AI is changing his craft I remember from any interview.
They've built AI/ML products at scale. Yixue led real-time personalization, visual search, and on-device model optimization at Pinterest. Mark built ML-powered workflow systems and agent-based experimentation at Uber. Felix rebuilt Nextdoor's feed ranking on deep learning (feature store, training pipeline, weekly model shipping) after leading the AI-personalization team behind LinkedIn Search.
Connected to the mission
For most people who join Hinge Health, our mission is a deciding factor, and these leaders were no different.
Felix broke his fibula, required surgery with a plate and eight screws, and spent nine months struggling to get to physical therapy in person because he couldn't drive. He wants to build the product he wished he'd had. Yixue sought out healthcare and education as domains where technology could have a more direct impact than e-commerce. Mark shared thoughtful reflections on healthcare data and AI's potential in a complex, high-stakes industry. Sagar wanted to apply decades of data platform experience to something that improves lives.
What this means for the engineers we want to hire next
All of these leaders are passionate about our mission, have an incredibly high bar, work in an AI-native way, and stay close to the craft. They are now hiring engineers who feel the same way.
Hinge Health has a license to innovate in healthcare that few companies have. If you want to do great work while learning from the best, and care about the impact of your work at scale, come join us.
See our open engineering roles.
Meet the team
Yixue Li — Sr. Director, Treatment Experience & AI Research
Yixue leads engineering for core parts of our care experience (exercise therapy, brain health) and our AI Research Lab. She was one of the early engineers at Pinterest, where she built real-time personalization, visual search, and virtual try-on. She then moved to Coupang, where she built the entire Search & Discovery experience team from scratch, leading mobile, backend, ML scientists, and computer vision engineers.
Originally from Sichuan, China (known for its bold spicy hot pot and beloved giant pandas), Yixue has lived in San Francisco for over a decade. She's a proud parent of two kids, Benji and Bella.
Felix Pageau — Sr. Director, Member Journey & Intelligent Care
Felix leads engineering for our member journey (enrollment through ongoing engagement) and AI-powered member communication. He previously rebuilt LinkedIn's entire Search experience, consolidating 28 rendering templates into a single unified architecture that cut new content onboarding from 70 dev-weeks to 5 and increased the pace from one new content type per year to four per quarter. At Nextdoor, he set a goal of increasing feed depth by 25% (when it had been moving in single digits annually), broke the problem down across infrastructure, UX, and ML workstreams, and hit 27%.
Felix lives in the Inner Sunset in San Francisco with his wife and two young kids. He's an avid cook with a current project: fermenting several hundred pounds of hachiya persimmon into a decent alcoholic drink. His family can usually be found at one of the Bay Area's many playgrounds, or at TrainTown in Sonoma.
Sagar Nallapareddy — Director, Data & ML Platform
Sagar leads our Data & ML Platform team, with a mission to make real-time, ML-friendly, comprehensive data ubiquitously available across the organization. He spent 13 years at Netflix, joining around employee 100 when they were still shipping DVDs. He grew alongside the company through three major data architecture migrations, leading data foundations across membership, product, and finance. He then spent 5.5 years at Meta as Head of Privacy Foundations Data Engineering, scaling his team from 5 to 30 engineers and rebuilding the privacy data architecture under intense regulatory pressure.
Born and raised in India, Sagar has lived in the U.S. for about 30 years and currently lives in the Bay Area near Fremont. He's an avid cyclist and runner — he completed AIDS/LifeCycle, a 560-mile ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He also loves movies. And yes, the movie passion predates Netflix.
Mark Tu — Director, Growth Engineering
Mark leads our Growth Engineering organization: the engineering teams behind acquiring and onboarding new members. He spent five years at Uber, where he unified six fragmented configuration and experimentation services into a single platform, scaling his team from 8 to over 40 engineers. Before Uber, at Dropbox, he built the marketing orchestration platform from scratch and led monetization infrastructure (payments and subscriptions) through the company's IPO. He started his career at Amazon, contributing to large-scale advertising platform engineering.
A proud Georgia Tech grad (Go Yellow Jackets!), Mark has lived and worked across Atlanta, the Bay Area, and Seattle. He currently lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter Dora, and is relocating to the Bay Area for this role.
