Founding Chief Medical Officer - Endoscopy

Founding Chief Medical Officer – Endoscopy

Company: Vanquish Cancer (Vanquish AI Corp) Location: Remote (U.S.) with travel to clinical sites, partner institutions, and conferences

Job Type: Part-time, Contract (Independent Consultant), Hourly

Pay: Market rate includes founding-team equity.

This is an equity-weighted role — see Compensation below.

Reports to: President & CEO

About Vanquish

Vanquish Cancer builds AI-powered precision oncology software for the cancers that are hardest to find early. Our platform, PANDA (Pan-Cancer Dx Assistant), brings real-time AI assistance and follows the patient longitudinally.

We are a small, experienced founding team — operators who have built, scaled, and exited life-science and technology companies — working with academic medical centers, integrated health systems, and community practices across the U.S. and internationally.

The Role

We are hiring our Founding Chief Medical Officer for Endoscopy: the clinical owner of everything EUS at Vanquish. This is the senior clinical voice in the company. You will define what "correct" looks like in our imaging data, take that standard into the clinic, carry it into our vendor and partner relationships, and defend it in front of investigators, sponsors, grant reviewers, and eventually regulators.

If you are an advanced endoscopist who has spent a career making high-consequence pancreatobiliary calls and you want that judgment encoded into a system that scales beyond your own procedure room, this is that job.

The engagement is structured as part-time, hourly consulting relationship with meaningful founding equity, designed to sit alongside an ongoing clinical practice or a recent retirement from one. Hours ramp with the work, growing as the annotation pipeline, study sites, and commercial pipeline scale. We are open to converting this to a salaried executive role over time for the right person.

The role is EUS-driven as foundational. Additional experience in confocal laser endomicroscopy (nCLE/pCLE) is a secondary area you will evaluate and advise on as an adjacent modality.

What You'll Own---

1. Annotation quality and ground truth (primary responsibility)

• Own the labeling ontology, annotation standards, and written guidance for EUS video and still-image annotation — what gets tracked, how boundaries are drawn, how uncertainty is handled.
• Set and enforce quality standards across our CVAT annotation pipeline: keyframe density and interpolation review, track continuity, frame-level tagging, and escalation of ambiguous cases.
• Serve as final adjudicator on disputed or uncertain cases, and define the rules for when a case is escalated rather than guessed.
• Audit and score work produced by internal annotators and contract physician reviewers; deliver clinical feedback that measurably improves their anatomical recognition.
• Recruit, onboard, train, and manage a bench of physician reviewers and consultant endosonographers as the pipeline scales.
• Define and monitor inter-reader agreement, ground-truth confidence tiers, and the criteria that let an annotated case enter model training.
• Work with the ML and IT teams on sampling strategy, throughput vs. fidelity tradeoffs, and how clinical outcome and pathology data are linked back to imaging.

2. Frontline EUS and clinical workflow

• Work in EUS clinics and procedure rooms — our own sites and partner sites — observing real cases, pressure-testing the product against live workflow, and bringing findings back to the team.
• Own the clinical usability of the real-time heads-up display: what appears on screen, when, at what confidence, and what would break an endosonographer's trust.
• Define the clinical protocols that govern how EUS video and images are acquired, captured, transferred, and de-identified at collaborating sites.
• Support site onboarding and clinical training at new deployments.

3. Research, development, and evidence

• Serve as clinical lead on our detection and characterization studies, working with our regulatory and biostatistics consultants on endpoint definition, protocol design, IRB submissions, and site selection.
• Define what clinically meaningful performance looks like — how model outputs map to real decisions, where errors are tolerable and where they are not.
• Contribute to the FDA evidence package for AI/ML SaMD detection and characterization submissions.
• Author and co-author abstracts, posters, and manuscripts; present at DDW, ACG, ASGE, ASCO, and comparable venues.
• Build and chair a clinical advisory board of endosonographers, surgeons, pathologists, and oncologists.

4. Grants and non-dilutive funding

• Serve as clinical lead or PI/co-PI on SBIR/STTR, NCI, and other federal and foundation applications.
• Partner with academic collaborators on multi-PI submissions; secure letters of support and site commitments.
• Translate clinical need into fundable specific aims.

5. Vendors, devices, and technology

• Clinical relationships with endoscopy and EUS platform vendors.
• Evaluate adjacent modalities to EUS — confocal endomicroscopy, elastography, contrast-enhanced EUS, needle and tissue-acquisition technologies — and advise on where they fit the roadmap.

6. Client success, engagement, and commercial support

• Serve as the clinical counterpart to prospective and current physician customers — demos, tumor-board conversations, peer-to-peer credibility on clinical claims.
• Support the business development team on proposals, pilots, and data partnerships with health systems and academic centers.
• Represent Vanquish at clinically facing symposia and discussions with KOLs, investigators.

7. Cross-functional leadership

• Work daily with the President, CTO and engineering/ML teams, the Annotations Project Manager, IT, business development, and the executive team.
• Manage consultant physicians and clinical contractors.
• Help build the clinical function as the company grows.

Qualifications---

Required

• MD or DO with board certification in Gastroenterology.
• Completion of a dedicated 4th-year Advanced Endoscopy Fellowship, or equivalent documented mastery in EUS.
• Substantial career volume in interventional EUS, with deep pancreatobiliary expertise — definitive ground-truth identification of the pancreas, ducts, vasculature, liver, and biliary tree.
• Familiarity with ASGE competency standards for EUS, including classification of tumors and cysts and EUS-based staging.
• Demonstrated ability to teach, standardize, and audit the reads of other physicians.
• Technical literacy: comfort with cloud tools, annotation software (training on CVAT provided), and structured data workflows; ability to translate clinical judgment into digital annotations.
• Strong written and verbal communication — you will be explaining clinical nuance to engineers and technical constraints to clinicians.

Preferred

• Prior industry experience with medical devices, diagnostics, or clinical AI/SaMD, including FDA submission experience.
• Experience or interest in as a PI or investigator on clinical studies; familiarity with IRB processes and multi-site study startup.
• Track record with NIH/SBIR or foundation grant funding.
• Experience with confocal laser endomicroscopy (nCLE/pCLE) or other advanced imaging adjuncts.
• Peer-reviewed publication record in pancreatobiliary EUS.
• Early-stage or startup experience or interest, and comfort operating without infrastructure.
• An established network among interventional endoscopists, GI leadership, and academic pancreas programs.

Practicing, semi-retired, and retired physicians are all encouraged to apply. The consulting structure is designed to sit alongside a continuing clinical practice, and hours are flexible.

Data Handling and Compliance---

Videos and images used in this work are fully de-identified and do not contain Protected Health Information. Where identified data is involved at partner sites, access is governed by executed BAAs, data use agreements, IRB approvals and HIPAA compliance. The consultant or employee is expected to maintain strict professional standards regarding data handling and confidentiality at all times.

Compensation---

The majority of the value in this role is equity, not cash. Vanquish is an early-stage company, and we are hiring a founding clinical leader on founding terms. The structure is:

• Hourly consulting fee per hour for time worked, invoiced against a signed consulting agreement. This is a real rate, but it is deliberately below what you would bill for clinical work — it covers your time, it is not the point of the role.
• Founding-team equity, granted with a standard vesting schedule and subject to board approval. This is the substance of the offer, and it is sized to reflect founding-level contribution rather than advisory-level involvement.

The right candidate is someone who has the financial latitude to trade current cash for meaningful ownership in a company they help build, and who wants to be a principal rather than a vendor.

What Else We Offer

• Direct partnership with the CEO and CTO; a genuine seat at the table on product, science, and strategy.
• The chance to build the clinical standard for AI-assisted EUS rather than inherit someone else's.
• Named clinical leadership on publications, abstracts, grant applications, and regulatory submissions.
• Remote-first work with flexible scheduling around clinical commitments.
• Travel and conference expenses covered.

Work Requirements

• Engaged as an independent contractor under a consulting agreement, NDA, and equity documentation; consultants are responsible for their own taxes, insurance, and benefits.
• Time is tracked and invoiced against the terms of the signed agreement.
• Reliable high-speed internet and a computer capable of streaming and reviewing high-definition video.
• Active, unrestricted medical license preferred; state requirements depend on any hands-on clinical activity.
• Candidates with existing employment must confirm that outside consulting and equity participation are permitted under their institutional or employment agreements.

Application Questions (for the Indeed screener)

• Have you completed a dedicated 4th-year Advanced Endoscopy Fellowship, or do you have equivalent documented mastery in Endoscopic Ultrasound?
• Approximately how many EUS procedures have you performed, and over what period? What is your current or most recent weekly EUS volume?
• Describe your experience in pancreatobiliary imaging, specifically your ability to provide definitive ground-truth identification of the pancreas, ducts, vasculature, liver, and biliary tree.
• Describe any experience you have setting standards for, teaching, or auditing the EUS reads of other physicians or trainees.
• Describe any experience translating clinical findings into digital annotations, structured data, or algorithm development for medical AI.
• Describe any experience with medical device or diagnostic industry work, FDA submissions, clinical study leadership, or grant-funded research.
• What is your availability in hours per week, and would this role sit alongside an ongoing clinical practice?
• This role is compensated primarily in founding equity, with an hourly consulting fee that is below clinical market rate. Are you comfortable with that structure, and what hourly rate would you expect?
• Are you able to accept outside consulting work and equity compensation under your current employment or institutional agreements?

Pay: $150.00 - $250.00 per hour

Application Question(s):

• Have you completed a dedicated 4th-year Advanced Endoscopy Fellowship, or do you have equivalent documented mastery in Endoscopic Ultrasound?
• Approximately how many EUS procedures have you performed, and over what period? What is your current or most recent weekly EUS volume?
• Describe your experience in pancreatobiliary imaging, specifically your ability to provide definitive ground-truth identification of the pancreas, ducts, vasculature, liver, and biliary tree.
• Describe any experience you have setting standards for, teaching, or auditing the EUS reads of other physicians or trainees.
• Describe any experience translating clinical findings into digital annotations, structured data, or algorithm development for medical AI.
• Describe any experience with medical device or diagnostic industry work, FDA submissions, clinical study leadership, or grant-funded research.
• What is your availability in hours per week, and would this role sit alongside an ongoing clinical practice?
• This role is compensated primarily in founding equity, with an hourly consulting fee that is below clinical market rate. Are you comfortable with that structure, and what hourly rate would you expect?
• Are you able to accept outside consulting work and equity compensation under your current employment or institutional agreements?

Work Location: Remote