Healthcare and labor-marketplace industries are becoming modernized fast, as facilities and frontline professionals, often working with scarce resources, could use automated systems that offer quick and reliable access to critical information. As a result, there's a growing need for people who know how to build platforms that can match their needs in real-time.
Within that landscape, Emil Rustamli has built a career on understanding how those systems function at ground level and how they can better serve the people who depend on them. His work spans global academic experience, early venture roles, and now product leadership at Clipboard Health, where he aims to help shape tools that make economic mobility more accessible for tens of thousands of healthcare workers.
An Early Realization That Took Rustamli From Consultant To Product Manager
Rustamli grew up in Baku at a time when access to modern tech or product-driven companies was limited, which only served to grow his early interest in how meaningful ideas become real solutions. That environment pushed him toward technology, leading him to find opportunities that didn't exist locally.
At Minerva University, where he studied Data Science and Economics, he learned through a global rotation model that placed students in world cities each semester, with each market he went to offering a different set of expectations and requiring him to study new sets of user behaviors. During that time, he also co-founded AiC, a youth-led initiative focused on advocating for safer and more ethical deployment in AI, which eventually expanded from Hyderabad to cities such as San Francisco, London, Paris, and Tokyo.
This set him on a path in venture capital at Fiat Ventures, where he began working with fintech startups and helping guide them through this field with market research and translating said research into insights. But he slowly began to understand the deeper differences between analyzing ideas and being accountable for building them. Venture, he felt, was rich in perspective but nowhere near as close to the realities that both company-makers and their users were going through.
That realization pushed him toward product roles, where decisions are tested immediately against user needs, setting himself up for his work at Clipboard Health, where his global background and analytical foundation now meet real-world impact.
Supporting Medical Staff At Clipboard Health
Rustamli joined Clipboard Health in 2025, entering a company focused on helping healthcare workers turn available hours into income and long-term career mobility. Clipboard Health connects professionals with facilities through an app that aims to make earning straightforward, fast, and dependable. Its mission matched the principles that'd guided his international trajectory, particularly that technology should widen access to opportunity.
At Clipboard Health, he works as a product manager on systems that sit at the center of the marketplace's operations, with tasks that put him in close collaboration with senior stakeholders of the company.
Much of his work relies on direct contact with users. The goal is to look for potential issues in communication or workflow before they become systemic. As he puts it, "Within the product area, we look for what leads to workers getting confused or overburdened. Then, outside of those conversations, we bring in quantitative data to figure out where users get stuck or where bugs appear."
This approach has informed several initiatives he's helped lead. He worked on improving reliability policies within the full-time hiring flow, clarifying expectations around interview bookings and attendance. The revisions reduced last-minute cancellations and no-shows, leading to higher show rates and helping to contribute to a more stable experience for facilities.
Across these responsibilities, he maintains an emphasis on outcomes that matter to workers: fair pay, predictable processes, and systems that can properly support them in doing essential work.
Making Sure Technology Helps Those Who Need It Most
Rustamli plans to continue focusing on work that strengthens Clipboard Health's marketplace and supports the workers who need it. His priorities include improving early-lifecycle retention, expanding the supply pool, and refining workflows that determine whether earning is fast and fair. He sees the company as a long-term environment where harder problems surface each year and where product decisions must continuously be analyzed to see what changes need to be made to support these changes.
That same pattern also applies to how he approaches product development. Rustamli sees consistently reworking the final product and listening to users as two driving forces to keep large marketplaces functioning reliably, especially for workers who depend on each shift for income. To him, the most consequential technology rarely looks dramatic; it works in the background, making sure that everything's working the way people need it to.
That perspective has grown from both global experience and day-to-day product work. As he puts it, "I've always wanted to stay close to curiosity — in other words, to stay young by staying on the edge of innovation," a view that frames how he chooses roles and evaluates the impact he can have.
His long-term path remains rooted in building: whether growing into leadership at Clipboard Health, advising early founders, or contributing to startup ecosystems globally. What unites those possibilities is a commitment to solving the kinds of problems that quietly shape people's lives — work that, for Emil Rustamli, matters more than visibility and lasts longer than trends.
