Founding Engineer

The Opportunity EQL Tech is partnering with PhormAI to hire an exceptional Founding Engineer to join its team as the company builds Darwin, its Physical AI platform for Health & Wellness, into the technical backbone of a multi-vertical health intelligence business. PhormAI is building Darwin to ingest multimodal sensor data — wearables, video, IMU, ECG — and generate clinical-grade insights through agentic AI. The platform is already live with paying customers across two distinct verticals: animal health (equine cardiac monitoring) and human health (tele-ICU intelligence deployed across multiple hospitals), with the architecture designed to extend into further verticals by swapping domain-specific ontologies rather than rebuilding the stack. The Role You'll be PhormAI's Founding Engineer. Reporting directly to the founders, you'll own the technical foundation of the product — the data and model pipelines, cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and the application layer built on top. Data pipelines: Build the pipelines that ingest, process, and transform data for the models. Cloud infrastructure: Stand up and operate compute, storage, networking, and deployment from scratch. Orchestration: Build the layer connecting ingestion, training, inference, evaluation, and serving. Operational foundations: Establish CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and alerting from the ground up. Application layer: Contribute to APIs, services, and user-facing surfaces on top of the platform. Technical strategy: Make foundational architectural decisions in direct partnership with the founders. Seniority isn't the bar here — what matters is a first-principles understanding of the stack and a track record of building end-to-end systems. You don't need a decade of experience. Python and SQL fundamentals that are genuinely strong, not just familiar. Production data pipelines — hands-on experience with Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar. Cloud proficiency — AWS, GCP, or Azure, including provisioning, IAM, and networking. Containers & orchestration — Docker and Kubernetes (or a managed equivalent). Infrastructure-as-code — Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK. Backend API design — REST, GraphQL, or gRPC, with working knowledge of auth. Relational database design — Postgres or similar, including query optimization. AI developer tooling — proficient with Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar. Cross-stack debugging — a track record of operating across the stack and untangling complex systems. Engineering judgment — sound instincts on trade-offs, not just technical breadth. Nice to have: real-time streaming systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kinesis, Flink); open-source contributions; experience with health or clinical data; full-stack product experience shipping user-facing web applications. Founding equity — meaningful ownership of the technical roadmap. Competitive base salary. Small, high-trust team — your work directly shapes the product. Build it right from day one — no legacy debt to inherit.