Founding Engineer (Potential CTO)
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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.
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