What Sword Health does
Sword Health delivers physical therapy, women’s health, cardiometabolic and mental health care remotely, using what it calls AI Care – clinical programmes delivered through an app with a clinician behind them rather than a chatbot in front of them. It was founded in 2015, employs roughly 830 people, and is headquartered in New York.
That last detail is worth correcting early, because Sword is widely described as a Portuguese company. It was founded in Porto and Portugal remains its largest European hiring base, but the corporate headquarters is American.
Remote Work Europe tracks Sword Health through the Connected members’ jobs board, where it is consistently one of the larger European employers by volume.
Remote culture: what it’s actually like
Sword does not publish a company-wide remote-working policy, which is itself informative. What the listings show is a company hiring remotely in specific European markets rather than one that has declared itself remote-first as a matter of identity.
In practice that means judging each advert on its own terms. Of the twenty-one Sword roles on our board at the end of September 2026, five were open EU-wide and the rest were tied to particular countries. A role that names a country is telling you something the company has not said in a policy document.
The clinical roles are remote for the same structural reason as the rest of digital health: the patient is at the other end of an app.
Hiring in Europe: the details
Countries. Portugal dominates. Of twenty-one roles at the end of September 2026, eleven were in Portugal, five in Germany, five open EU-wide, two in Greece and one in the United Kingdom.
Employment model. Mixed, and stated in the advert. Sword advertises both employed and contractor positions for the same clinical discipline – we recorded a Physiotherapist Contractor role alongside an employed part-time physiotherapist post.
Working patterns. One of the twenty-one roles was explicitly part-time, in the job title.
Language. English for commercial and technical roles. Three of the twenty-one were language-specific.
Salary approach. Not published.
Remote Work Europe Connected
EUR 15 a month for daily curated remote job leads across Europe, hand-picked and scam-filtered, with employment type and language requirements tagged where the employer states them.
Who they’re looking for
Two quite different populations. Clinically: physiotherapists and allied health professionals, some employed, some contracted, delivering care through the platform.
Commercially and technically: growth marketing directors, heads of operations, patient success managers, AI engineers, and a Chief of Staff to the German managing director – which tells you Germany is being built out as a market rather than covered from Porto.
What the hiring pattern tells you
Thirteen of Sword’s twenty-one roles were non-technical, which makes it an unusually accessible employer for a company that describes itself as a frontier AI lab.
The more useful signal is the employed-versus-contractor split appearing within the same clinical discipline. Most employers pick one and stick to it. Sword advertises both, which means the distinction is a real choice being made role by role – and it is the thing to establish before you invest in an application, because it changes your tax position, your social security contributions and your income security entirely.
Remote Work Europe flags contract-rather-than-employment on the members’ board wherever an employer states it, precisely because so few adverts make it obvious. Our piece on what “remote” actually means on a job advert covers the wider problem of adverts that describe a working arrangement without describing the contract underneath it.
How to apply
- Careers page: Sword Health posts through Greenhouse and applications go directly to the company
- LinkedIn: Sword Health on LinkedIn
Specific tips: read the contract type in the advert before anything else, and if it is not stated, ask in your first exchange. For clinical roles, name your registration and the country it is valid in immediately. And if you are applying to a Portugal-based role from elsewhere in Europe, be explicit about where you would be tax resident – a company hiring at this volume in one market has a standard arrangement, and you want to know whether you fit it.
See our full guide to Remote-First Companies That Actually Hire in Europe, and our guide to freelancing and the admin layer in Portugal.