Tech Lead

Health is the most precious thing we have.

At Palm, we're building the founding team that will make it better for everyone, starting where it matters most: the first 1000 days of life.

📍 Rome, hybrid (2 days a week in the office)

💼 Full-time, senior · 7+ years, 2+ leading a team

💶 €55,000 – €70,000 gross per year (RAL), based on experience

THE ROLE

You'll own day-to-day software development and delivery, working hands-on in the code and leading the team. You'll report to our CTO, who sets the technology direction and key choices, and collaborate with our AI and Product Lead, who oversees user needs and product priorities. You'll turn that direction into technical design, achievable work and releases we can verify, balancing speed, quality and technical debt.

FOUR HARD PROBLEMS. YOU'LL OWN THEM.

01 · From first version to platform. Palm is live. Now it needs to become a platform that is solid, modular and quick to change, evolved step by step without stopping releases.

02 · One core, many channels. Design an architecture where the same core serves every way people reach Palm: our apps, messaging and other AI agents.

03 · Shipping health software. Sensitive data and clinical content, so regressions matter and we want to catch them early: tests, CI/CD, rollbacks, security, AI quality checks in the pipeline.

04 · Building the team. Lead a small team that ships every week. Grow its autonomy, set the bar in code review, and help hire the next technical Palmers.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead day-to-day development, supporting the team in design, implementation and problem solving, and contributing code on the most complex or critical parts.
• Define detailed technical design and document key decisions, bringing the high-impact ones to the CTO.
• Assess the current architecture and propose an incremental evolution towards more modularity and separation of services.
• Organise delivery: breaking down work, estimates, dependencies, capacity and blockers, making progress and risks visible.
• Strengthen our Agile/Scrum practice already under way, with just enough process for the team.
• Own PRs, code review, branch protection, coding standards and the Definition of Done.
• Strengthen automated testing, CI/CD, development and staging environments, release and rollback procedures.
• Work with our infrastructure lead on cloud, monitoring, alerting, performance, security and continuity.
• Run bug and incident management with clear priorities, impact, owners and follow-ups.
• Make backend, frontend/mobile and AI components work together: API contracts, error handling, end-to-end tests.
• Grow the team's autonomy through mentoring and feedback, and help hire and onboard new technical people.

ABOUT YOU

• 7+ years in software development, including 2+ leading a team, with direct ownership of design, code quality, planning and production releases. We also consider candidates with fewer years if we think they could be a solid fit.
• You've strengthened development processes and grown a team's autonomy, and know when to bring the CTO in.
• Strong backend: API design, databases, system integration.
• You improve an existing codebase step by step instead of rewriting everything from scratch.
• Hands-on with Git, pull requests, code review, automated testing and CI/CD; familiar with cloud, containers, monitoring and secure development.
• You spot bottlenecks and weigh architectural options by benefit, cost and operational complexity.
• Experience with technical planning and running an agile development process.
• You've integrated AI features (LLMs, RAG or similar) into real products and know what they need in testing, monitoring and error handling.
• You make constraints, risks and trade-offs explicit with engineers, product and management. Good technical English.
• Pragmatic, quality-minded, and happy with your hands in the code.

Bonus points: taking a product from first versions to growth and maturity; Product Owner skills (backlog refinement, user stories, acceptance criteria, prioritisation); React, hybrid mobile apps and Capacitor, or native mobile; GCP, GitHub Actions and document databases; healthcare, sensitive data or regulated software (IEC 62304, ISO 13485); a degree in CS, engineering or similar.

YOUR FIRST PRIORITIES

Get to know the product, the architecture and how we work, and progressively take over day-to-day technical coordination. Strengthen the technical backlog, code review, testing and releases. Then, with the CTO and the team, define an evolution plan that tackles the main risks and supports product priorities, without introducing premature complexity.

LONGEVITY STARTS IN THE WOMB

The first 1000 days, from conception to a child's second birthday, are the most formative window in human health. This is when the brain, the immune system and the metabolism are wired. Research on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) shows that what happens in this window shapes neurodevelopment, immunity and metabolic health, with effects that last a lifetime.

In the first 1000 days you can programme the system. In adulthood, you can mostly repair it.

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

Health data is the most important data people own, and the worst organised. General-purpose AI can talk about medicine, but it can't reason over your record or show where an answer came from.

Palm is the clinical memory of every person, with an AI on top that answers only from validated clinical evidence and the person's own data. We start with children and the first 1000 days. The goal is a lifetime.

• Science first. Built on validated clinical protocols and guidelines, reviewed by doctors, never the open internet.
• Measured, not guessed. Every answer is linked to its sources and evaluated against benchmarks built with clinicians.
• Built for what's next. Soon people will ask their own AI agents about their health. We want Palm to be the trusted source behind those answers.

WE'RE LOOKING FOR PALMERS

Everyone has a handful of names on speed dial: the family doctor, the partner, the colleague who knows all the tricks, the friend who picks up at 3am. We're looking for those people: the ones others call first when something really matters. We call them Palmers.

We're building our founding team, and we'll be very selective: the first people shape everything that follows. When the question is how we build and ship Palm, we'd like this candidate to be our first call.

WHO YOU'LL WORK CLOSELY WITH

• Our CTO and the talented Palmers of our tech team.
• Our CEO, a tech innovation leader with 15+ years in Big Tech (Yahoo, LinkedIn, Amazon, AWS). Part of the launch teams that brought Amazon to Australia and Singapore; at AWS she built a global innovation program for 500+ companies. As an Amazon Bar Raiser she has run 400+ interviews.
• Our CMO, a paediatrician and neonatologist (MD, PhD) with 25 years in medicine, from neonatal intensive care to research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she is still an affiliated researcher.
• The paediatricians, neonatologists and health experts we partner with, and the Palmers in marketing, growth and business.

YOU'LL LOVE IT HERE IF…

✓ Running a great sprint is your superpower.

✓ You unblock people before they ask, and turn messy priorities into a clear plan.

✓ You love turning "it works" into "it's solid", one step at a time.

✓ You lead by example, with your hands still in the code.

PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF…

✗ Your first instinct is to rewrite everything.

✗ You want to manage and stop coding.

✗ You need a big team and heavy process to move.

✗ You are looking for remote-only opportunities.

HOW WE HIRE

1. Intro call (30 min): who you are, what you've built, what you're looking for.

2. Technical deep dive with our CTO.

3. A real Palm problem. We work through it together. No whiteboard puzzles.

4. Meet the founders.

Believe you're a Palmer?

👉 Click Apply and leave us your details. We'd love to know who you are, what you've built, and what makes you the person on everyone's speed dial.