Founding Engineer

Our client, an AI-driven startup in the pharmaceuticals industry, is hiring a Founding Engineer to join their team in New York. The successful candidate will join a live, revenue-generating product used in real clinical trials, responsible for contributing to architectural and technical decisions from day one, while helping to shape the engineering culture of a company building software in a highly regulated environment.

• Design and scale AWS infrastructure to support a growing portfolio of clinical trials, with enterprise-grade security including SSO, WAF, SIEM and penetration testing.
• Build robust data integrations across fragmented clinical trial systems, dictionaries and standards.
• Develop the infrastructure that makes LLM and heuristic systems reliable in regulated environments, including evaluation pipelines, auditability, reproducibility and guardrails.
• Work directly with clinical users such as data managers, medical monitors and biostatisticians to translate workflows into product features.
• Support deployments, sandbox environments, and pilot studies.
• Define engineering standards across code quality, testing, deployment workflows and technical stack decisions.

• At least 5 years of experience shipping production software.
• Strong backend engineering experience, ideally in Python.
• Comfortable working across the stack, including Type Script and React.
• Solid database design experience, with Postgres at scale preferred.
• Strong AWS and cloud infrastructure experience.
• Ability to design systems under real-world constraints, including correctness, auditability, and performance on messy data.
• Strong communication skills with non-technical stakeholders and the ability to translate requirements into software.
• Experience in clinical trials, healthcare, or life sciences software, including EDC systems, clinical data management or regulatory platforms is a bonus.
• Previous experience working in a startup or fast-paced environment.
• Experience working in SOC 2, HIPAA or other regulated environments is a plus.

• Salary: $150k - $170k.
• Equity.
• Health, vision and dentall insurance.