We’re betting hard on GMT
As the founder of Junction, I spend a lot of time in interviews. And in those interviews, one thing comes up over and over: "why are you hiring engineers in Europe when most of your customers are in the US?" We make our money in America - our customers are American labs, clinicians, and developers. So why do we believe GMT is the best timezone in the world in which to grow our engineering team?
It started with people
My biggest lesson as a founder - hiring is the most important thing you can possibly do. And when I think back, we were incredibly lucky that the early engineering hires I made were the right people. When I founded Junction, I only had my network and when you’re starting out, often your first hires are the best engineers you know. But it’s been incredible to see the journey that they’ve gone on - everyone here (inlcuding me) has grown so much
Naivety is a product advantage
The first thing most new joiners say is how complex the US healthcare system is - it’s one of the most insular industries on the planet and its own assumptions about how things have to work and most of those assumptions go unquestioned because everyone inside the system grew up with them.
As we hired more team members, we found that someone who didn't spend their career inside the US healthcare system asks different questions. Not naïve questions, useful ones. Why does this have to work this way? What if it didn't? That outsider instinct has shaped how we think about our API design, our abstractions, and what we choose not to build.
For example, in the US, a lab can run a test, return the result, and then weeks later have the insurance claim denied, the service was rendered, the patient was served, but the lab doesn't get paid. You’d be tempted to accept this, if you live in the U.S. as this is how all insurance works.
A European engineer's reaction is simpler: the service was already rendered, how is this still a question? That instinct leads you to surface eligibility and coverage risk at the order stage, before the test runs, rather than discovering it on an explanation of benefits weeks later. It means treating a test order as a financial event, not just a clinical one; and that shapes how you design the API.
GMT cities punch above their weight
People move to London, Dublin and Lisbon from all over the world to build. Having worked as an engineer in both London and Lisbon, they are two cities with a buzz about them. You can be sitting next to someone in a coffee shop and overhear that they’re at Anthropic, or just joined a pre-seed company as a founding engineer. There are meetups, conferences, hackathons and other events where builders engage with each other almost every day.
We're still a small company. Every hire shapes what Junction becomes. If you're in the UK, Ireland or Portugal and the pressure and reward of maintaining highly available, complex, life-saving healthcare infrastructure excites you, we'd love to talk.