Founding Engineer
(Full-Stack Product Engineering & Agentic AI)
Compensation: $170K–$250K base + founding-level equity
Location: New York City — five days on-site
The Company
A rapidly scaling, venture-backed healthcare technology company is building a new model for navigating complex care. Its platform combines software, human expertise and AI to help care teams coordinate everything from medical workflows to insurance, benefits and wider social-care needs.
The company is post-Series A, growing quickly and tackling a problem where software quality, operational correctness and trust have a direct impact on people’s lives.
The Opportunity
This is a founding-engineer role with significant influence over the product, architecture and engineering culture. You will work across full-stack product development, complex backend systems and AI-native workflows rather than joining a narrowly defined engineering function.
The company is deliberately keeping the founding engineering team small and high-calibre before scaling the broader organization.
The Role
You will build software end to end, from backend infrastructure and data models through to polished workflows used every day by care-management professionals.
A major focus is an AI-powered continuous-learning platform that turns real-world interactions into useful knowledge, maintains rich contextual understanding and increasingly supports users through agentic workflows.
What You’ll Do
Architect and build backend services, APIs, data models and platform capabilities supporting complex healthcare workflows.
Develop full-stack product experiences using modern TypeScript and React technologies.
Build AI-driven workflows, retrieval and knowledge systems that learn continuously from real-world interactions.
Design systems that reason about provenance, confidence, changing information and highly contextual user data.
Improve operational systems spanning care workflows, communications, insurance processes and billing infrastructure.
Work directly with users to understand how they operate and turn those observations into better product and engineering decisions.
Help establish engineering standards across architecture, reliability, testing, performance and code quality.
What You’ll Bring
Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals with particular depth in backend and systems design.
Experience owning meaningful products or systems end to end rather than operating within a narrowly defined engineering remit.
Strong understanding of database and ontology design, APIs and modern service architectures.
Product judgement and an appreciation for UX, interaction design and software that feels considered and polished.
Evidence of high autonomy, strong problem solving and the ability to operate without detailed requirements or heavy management.
Experience in a fast-moving startup environment, or comparable evidence that you can build effectively with limited structure.
Comfort working with modern AI tooling and integrating LLM-driven capabilities into real product workflows.
What This Role Requires
Approximately three or more years of meaningful software engineering experience, unless your track record demonstrates equivalent depth unusually early in your career.
Genuine full-stack capability with strong backend fundamentals; this is not a frontend-only position.
Ability to reason about system architecture, databases, data models and complex product workflows.
Willingness to work on-site in New York City five days per week.
High ownership and comfort operating in a demanding early-stage environment.
Tech Stack
TypeScript
React
Next.js
AWS or similar cloud infrastructure
SQL and non-SQL databases
APIs and SDKs
Service-oriented architectures
LLMs, agentic workflows and modern AI-native tooling
Why Join
Join at founding-engineer level and influence the architecture, engineering culture and product while the company is still early enough for individual decisions to matter.
Work on technically difficult problems spanning agentic AI, continuous learning, full-stack systems and high-stakes real-world workflows.
Build software for an underserved user base where improvements can have an immediate and tangible impact on the quality of care people receive.
About People in AI
People in AI is a specialist recruitment partner connecting exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering talent with some of the most ambitious technology companies in the world. We work closely with founders, technical leaders, and hiring teams to represent opportunities accurately and help candidates assess genuine fit.
