Founding Engineer (Potential CTO)

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

A fast-moving, seed-stage digital health company is looking for a Founding Engineer (potential CTO) to be the second technical voice on the team. This is a rare 0→1 opportunity to shape the full engineering direction of an AI-native mobile health platform that uses biosignal data and real-time coaching to help people manage chronic symptoms by improving autonomic nervous system health.

You'll own the architecture, ship the first end-to-end AI product experience, define the engineering culture, and grow into a CTO role as the company scales. This is a deeply hands-on, in-person role based in New York City, San Francisco, or Montreal.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Serve as the founding engineer and de facto technical leader, owning both direction and execution.

- Ship the v1 AI coaching experience end-to-end — from a React Native mobile app to frontier-model-backed inference and wearable integrations.

- Architect and build the nervous system training AI coach, including model design, prompt engineering, tool use, and evaluation pipelines.

- Translate biosignals (HRV, breath, motion, PPG) into a real-time, personalized coaching layer.

- Build AI-powered QA and testing pipelines to enable safe, rapid daily shipping.

- Own full-stack decisions across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI-native layers.

- Integrate iOS/HealthKit and wearable platforms (e.g., Apple Watch, Oura, Whoop, EEG headbands).

- Define and uphold engineering standards and culture as the team grows.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Dealbreakers (must-haves):

- Proven experience shipping and operating Claude or other frontier LLMs in production (prompts, tool use, evals).

- Ability and willingness to work in-person in New York, San Francisco, or Montreal.

- 3+ years in mobile/full-stack engineering with demonstrated 0→1 consumer mobile app delivery to real users.

Required skills & experience:

- Fluency in React Native with full ownership of the mobile lifecycle (build, release, debug, monitor, iterate).

- Experience with AI-native infrastructure where AI is integrated across layers, not bolted on.

- Backend development in Node.js or Python with PostgreSQL and modern infra (Vercel, Fly, Render, or similar).

- Comfortable moving across frontend, backend, infra, and AI layers with minimal handholding.

- Experience with HealthKit, wearable APIs, or biosignal data (HRV, PPG, motion) in real-time contexts.

- Founder mindset with prior first-engineer or early-stage startup experience and the ability to make hard tradeoffs.

Nice to have:

- Experience building AI-powered testing or evaluation pipelines.

- Background or deep interest in nervous system science, somatics, neuroscience, or trauma research.

- Prior experience as the first engineer at a startup.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Base salary: $170,000

- Equity: Meaningful early-stage equity offered (range up to $2M in potential value)

- Opportunity to grow into a CTO title as the company scales

Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

LOCATION

This is an on-site role. Candidates must be able to work in person in one of three locations: New York City, NY · San Francisco, CA · Montreal, Canada. Remote work is not available for this position.