Founding Product Engineer

Founding Product Engineer | a16z-backed AI startup with 11 of the top 15 customers in its market | San Francisco (on-site) | $170K–$220K base + founding equity

We’ve partnered with an AI startup going after the biggest bottleneck in drug development: getting patients into clinical trials. Around 80 percent of trials are delayed by recruitment, and every day of delay costs a sponsor somewhere between $600,000 and $8 million. Their SMS and voice agents screen patients, route them to the right trial, book them in with the site’s recruiters and support them around the clock once enrolled. This isn’t a pre-revenue bet: the agents already hold more than 100,000 patient conversations a month, they’ve landed 11 of the top 15 customers in the space including top-20 pharma companies, their win rate is above 92 percent and the largest live contract is worth over $400,000 a year. They’ve raised $4.3M from Andreessen Horowitz, Jack Altman and the co-founder of Flatiron Health, and the team is eight people in San Francisco.

This is a founding engineering seat on a team of four engineers including the CTO, so you’ll own product end to end rather than a slice of it. One thing to be straight about up front: this is a product engineering role, not an ML research one. You’ll be building what patients, recruiters and trial sites actually use, across frontend, backend and infrastructure. If shipping the whole thing yourself sounds like the fun part, you’ll thrive here.

The Role

Build and ship full-stack product end to end in TypeScript, Next.js and Python on AWS: design it, code it, deploy it and take the feedback from customers yourself.

Orchestrate a fleet of AI agents coordinating patient recruitment across hundreds of clinical trials, keeping conversations consistent across voice, SMS and email.

Build the tools recruiters and research coordinators live in: scheduling and rescheduling, call summaries, analytics dashboards, and routing patients who don’t qualify to studies they do.

Integrate with trial sites’ existing systems, including reverse engineering legacy healthcare software that has no public API.

Work directly with the CTO on architecture and design decisions as the product lines expand.

About You

You have 1 to 6 years as a software engineer building products for real users, and you’ve led projects end to end.

You’ve been a founder, a founding or early engineer, or an engineer at a high-growth venture-backed startup, and you’ve owned what you shipped.

You’re properly full-stack: you’ve designed and built polished frontends yourself as well as the backend and infrastructure behind them. Backgrounds focused mainly on ML, research or backend-only work are less likely to fit.

You can write strong code by hand, without leaning on AI tools to do it for you.

You care about healthcare or life sciences, ideally having built something patients or clinicians used.

You have an undergraduate degree in CS, EECS, Maths or similar from a university in the US, Europe or Australia.

Practicalities

On site at Salesforce Tower in San Francisco six days a week, with Saturdays as shorter days. These are start-up working hours, not your usual 9 to 5, and the team is upfront about that. The company is open to visa transfers including OPT and H-1B.

The role pays a $170K–$220K base plus 0.1 to 1 percent equity, and there are three founding seats to fill, so the team is moving quickly.

If you want real ownership at a company that already leads its market, apply now or send your CV to will@inventurerecruitment.com.