Bates Jernigan

Bates Jernigan

Founding engineer. I build 0→1 products at early-stage startups.

I'm a software engineer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Right now I'm a founding engineer at Altira Health, building voice and SMS AI that checks in on patients after they leave the hospital.

Over the past decade I've built backend systems for healthcare, accounting and workplace software, put LLMs into production pipelines, and managed the teams that run them. This is where I write about that work.

Writing

The first post is on its way.

Work

  1. Altira Health

    Founding EngineerApr 2026 to present

    Building clinical-grade voice and SMS AI that follows up with patients after they leave the hospital.

    Pre-seed round led by Homebrew, 2025

  2. Aiwyn

    Principal Software Engineer / Engineering ManagerMar 2025 to Apr 2026

    Technical owner for backend systems while managing the team. Shipped LLM pipelines (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini) that analyze, extract and validate data from PDFs and forms, with observability and evaluation built in.

    Raised $113M led by KKR and Bessemer Venture Partners, 2024

  3. Taxa

    Staff Software EngineerMay 2024 to Mar 2025

    AI-driven tax preparation software for CPA firms.

    Acquired by Aiwyn and relaunched as Aiwyn Tax, 2025

  4. SmarterDx

    Senior Software EngineerMay 2023 to May 2024

    AI that reviews hospital charts before billing to catch missed diagnoses and documentation gaps.

    Acquired by New Mountain Capital for about $1B in cash and stock, 2025

  5. Carbon Health

    Senior Software EngineerNov 2021 to May 2023

    Designed and built the Kotlin service that tracks each patient's primary care provider, exposed over gRPC and GraphQL. Led code reviews and mentored junior engineers.

    Raised $350M led by Blackstone at a reported $3.3B valuation, 2021

  6. SpaceIQ

    Software Engineering ManagerApr 2021 to Nov 2021

    Senior Backend EngineerApr 2018 to Apr 2021

    Rewrote the core product alongside the tech lead, moving compute-heavy logic from Ruby to Scala for a faster, more reliable system. Later managed the team.

    Acquired by WeWork, 2019

  7. Speed Digital

    Full Stack DeveloperJan 2015 to Apr 2018

    Built and maintained Ruby on Rails, Node.js and AngularJS apps for a suite of web products.

Education

B.S., Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2014–2016