The Problem
Severe mental illness affects over 15 million adults in the United States. Schizophrenia. Schizoaffective disorder. Bipolar I. Treatment-resistant depression. These are the conditions the rest of healthcare has systematically failed to build for.
What makes this problem different from most of healthcare is that the tools to solve it do not exist. The clinical protocols, the measurement science, the precision medicine, the technology to deliver coordinated longitudinal outpatient care for this population. None of it has been built. This is a frontier problem, and it requires frontier science and care delivery to solve.
We are developing all of it. The care, the science, the technology.
The Problem
Severe mental illness affects over 15 million adults in the United States. Schizophrenia. Schizoaffective disorder. Bipolar I. Treatment-resistant depression. These are the conditions the rest of healthcare has systematically failed to build for.
What makes this problem different from most of healthcare is that the tools to solve it do not exist. The clinical protocols, the measurement science, the precision medicine, the technology to deliver coordinated longitudinal outpatient care for this population. None of it has been built. This is a frontier problem, and it requires frontier science and care delivery to solve.
We are developing all of it. The care, the science, the technology.
Who We Are
Amae Health is a Series B, venture-backed Public Benefit Corporation that delivers specialty outpatient care for people living with severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar I disorder, and treatment-resistant depression. We design and operate high-acuity, in-person clinics across the United States.
Our model integrates psychiatry, therapy, primary care, dietitians, and community health workers under one roof to deliver coordinated, longitudinal care for a population that has historically been fragmented across systems.
Leading health systems collaborate with Amae to bring this model to their communities, including NewYork-Presbyterian, Cedars-Sinai, Mass General Brigham, Novant Health, and CommonSpirit Health. Our investors include health systems such as Cedars-Sinai and CommonSpirit Health, organizations that evaluated our model clinically and chose to back it.
Why We Are Different
Many clinicians who join Amae have worked in PHPs, IOPs, inpatient psychiatry, or community mental health. They understand the limitations of the traditional system. Amae was built to change that—for patients and for clinicians.
Integrated care, not a referral network. Psychiatrists, therapists, primary care providers, dietitians, and community health workers work side-by-side and share responsibility for the same patients.
Practice at the top of your license. Manageable caseloads, meaningful clinical depth, and purpose-built tools designed for this population.
Continuous learning. Through our partnership with Mass General Brigham, clinicians receive ongoing training, supervision, and mentorship in evidence-based SMI care.
Advancing the field. Our clinicians contribute to new outcomes frameworks and research shaping the future of severe mental illness care.
A model built for sustainability. Team-based care, thoughtful caseloads, and strong infrastructure make this work meaningful—and sustainable over time.
The Opportunity:
We are hiring a Virtual Intake Therapist to serve as the clinical front door for prospective members across our California clinics. This is a fully virtual, licensed clinical role responsible for conducting comprehensive intake assessments and determining the right course of care for individuals living with serious mental illness (SMI).
Every person who reaches out to Amae for the first time will go through you. You'll conduct the clinical intake assessment — biopsychosocial history, mental status exam, risk assessment, diagnostic impression and level of care determination — and make the call: is this person a fit for Amae's integrated SMI care model, and if so, which clinic and care team should take them on? If not, you'll provide an appropriate referral rather than force a fit that isn't right.
This role centralizes and standardizes the intake function that today lives with individual Clinic Directors, giving prospective members a faster, more consistent front door across every California clinic.
What You'll Do:
- Comprehensive Virtual Intake Assessment - Conduct virtual biopsychosocial assessments, mental status exams, and risk assessments for individuals inquiring about Amae's services.
- Level of Care & Fit Determination - Determine whether Amae's integrated SMI care model is clinically appropriate for the prospective member, and determine their qualification to join our PHP or IOP programs. If they are not a fit, provide referrals to a more appropriate level or type of care.
- Diagnostic Impressions - Develop diagnostic impressions and preliminary treatment recommendations to hand off to the receiving clinic's care team.
- Clinic Coordination - Interface with Clinic Directors and care teams across California regarding patient appropriateness and readiness for programming, ensuring a smooth warm hand-off.
- Family & Referrer Communication - Answer questions from prospective members, their families, and referring providers about Amae's programs, and screen inbound referrals for appropriateness.
- Represent Amae’s Program - Engage potential members and their caregivers on what Amae Health’s program entails, what differentiates our outcomes, and how members might benefit from our program. Communicate our program effectively while ensuring the patient’s needs are met
- Documentation & Utilization Review - Maintain accurate, timely intake documentation, and coordinate with the utilization review/insurance authorization process.
- Overflow Clinical Coverage (as needed) - Provide occasional individual or group therapy coverage across California clinics during lower-intake-volume periods.
About You:
You've done real clinical intake work before and you're comfortable being the person who makes the call on fit and level of care. You ask good questions, listen for what's underneath the presenting complaint, and you're not afraid to say no to a referral that isn't right for Amae's model. You're organized enough to manage a full day of assessments without losing the thread on any one person, and you communicate clearly and quickly with our enrollment team and Clinic Directors so hand-offs don't drop. You're comfortable doing all of this over video, with the same rigor you'd bring in person.
What We're Looking For
- An active license to practice as a therapist in California (e.g., LCSW, LMFT, LPCC, or Licensed Psychologist), in good standing is required. Supervision hours are not available for this role.
- Master's or Doctoral degree in social work, psychology, counseling, or a related clinical field
- Prior experience conducting clinical intake assessments, diagnostic evaluations, and/or level-of-care determinations, ideally in a PHP/IOP, community mental health, or hospital-adjacent setting
- Direct experience working with serious mental illness (SMI) populations, including psychotic spectrum and mood disorders
- Strong working knowledge of risk assessment and crisis safety planning
- Excellent, fast, clear written and verbal communication — you'll be coordinating hand-offs with clinic teams throughout the day
- Comfortable and effective delivering clinical assessments over video/telehealth
- Highly organized, able to manage a full daily schedule of assessments without losing continuity
- Technologically savvy, with the ability to learn and navigate new tools quickly
What We’re Building
As a clinician at Amae, you are not adjacent to this work. You are essential to it.
- A national care delivery model for the highest-acuity patients in behavioral health.
- Precision medicine for SMI. Individualized treatment informed by multimodal clinical, behavioral, and social data.
- A clinical operating system that puts longitudinal data, real-time patient signals, and purpose-built tools into a single decision layer for care teams.
- Frontier science and measurement: defining and validating the outcomes frameworks that this field has never had. Hospitalizations avoided, days stable, functional improvement, and more.
- A partnership model with the country’s leading health systems that proves coordinated SMI care can work at scale.
What We Value
We center care in all we do. Empathy is not a brand value. It’s how we make clinical decisions, build products, and treat each other.
We challenge convention. The existing system is the problem. We question it, we test alternatives, and we move with urgency when something works.
We take the work seriously, not ourselves. High standards and humanity are not in tension. We hold a hard bar for quality while leaving room for humor and levity.
Your job isn’t done until the job is done. We close gaps, we follow through, and we don’t hide behind titles or org charts.
We win together and fail together. We own outcomes as a team. We learn fast. We don’t do blame.
We hustle with humility. Speed matters. So does integrity. We assume best intent and stay grounded in the mission.
Compensation & Benefits
Amae Health is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $58-$68 per hour and will be adjusted to market cost. Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage. Parental leave and programs built around well-being. We’ll share specifics during the interview process.
If you want to practice at the top of your license, learn from the best in academic medicine, contribute to research that is defining a new field, and do it all inside a team that was actually built for this work, we’d like to talk.
What We Value
- We center care in all we do. Empathy is not a brand value. It’s how we make clinical decisions, build products, and treat each other.
- We challenge convention. The existing system is the problem. We question it, we test alternatives, and we move with urgency when something works.
- We take the work seriously, not ourselves. High standards and humanity are not in tension. We hold a hard bar for quality while leaving room for humor and levity.
- Your job isn’t done until the job is done. We close gaps, we follow through, and we don’t hide behind titles or org charts.
- We win together and fail together. We own outcomes as a team. We learn fast. We don’t do blame.
- We hustle with humility. Speed matters. So does integrity. We assume best intent and stay grounded in the mission.
