Senior Founding Product Engineer

About the company

The company is a talent partner helping companies build exceptional remote teams across IT, software, product, and digital innovation. We collaborate with leading enterprises and fast-scaling tech businesses worldwide to help them access world class talent and accelerate growth. With operations across the globe our mission is to make building high performing global teams simple, fast, and cost-effective. The company has hundreds of clients with more than 200 engineers, testers, product managers, designers, and technology experts delivering impactful solutions every day.

About the client

Our client is an innovative Australian health technology company developing an AI-powered anxiety coaching application based on an evidence-based psychological approach to managing anxiety.

The application is designed for iOS and Android using React Native, with a React-based website supporting user registration and subscriptions. Currently in the testing phase and approaching its soft launch, the platform features an AI-powered coaching assistant that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to deliver structured, personalised coaching conversations.

The AI Coach operates within a clinically guided framework, incorporating structured coaching pathways, a toolkit of resources, conversational guidelines, and built-in safety mechanisms that can intervene when necessary.

As the platform handles sensitive mental health information, security, privacy, and responsible AI development are central to its design and ongoing operation.

About the role

We are hiring one person to own the product's engineering end-to-end. You will be the technical owner of the AI Coach and the systems around it, reporting directly to a non-technical founder. You plan your own work, set your own technical direction within the product brief, and ship. There is no CTO above you and no agency to lean on - you are the engineering function, working at speed with AI-first tooling and agentic coding workflows.

• Own the AI Coach: prompting, conversation state and progression, retrieval (Pinecone), model selection and evaluation, and the safety/crisis layer - tested against scripted clinical scenarios

• Own the backend: Python 3.12, FastAPI, GraphQL (Strawberry), SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, AWS (Sydney)

• Own mobile and web delivery: React Native (iOS + Android) and React, including App Store / Google Play / Stripe subscriptions

• Own release engineering: CI/CD, environments, signing credentials, monitoring, backups, rollback - built for fast, safe, frequent releases

• Bring a product eye: you care how screens look and feel on mobile and web, not just whether the API returns 200

• Translate technical decisions into plain language for the founder and clinical team

How you work (this is the core of the role)

You are an AI-first engineer. You use agentic coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code or equivalent) as your default workflow - planning, generating, reviewing and shipping with AI leverage rather than writing everything by hand. You build evaluation harnesses so the AI Coach can be tested automatically against scenario suites on every change. You are a self-starter who takes a brief, breaks it into a plan, communicates the plan, executes it, and reports outcomes - with direction from the founder but without needing technical supervision.

• Plan -> Approve -> Deliver: you propose the plan, get sign-off on direction, and own execution

• Comfortable being the only engineer initially: you learn the system from the code (there is limited as-built documentation) and make it yours

• Bias to shipping: small, frequent, reversible releases with monitoring and rollback in place

• Judgement over heroics: this is a mental health product - safety thresholds and crisis handling are governed by legal and clinical sign-off, and you build the systems that enforce them

Requirements

• Proven experience shipping LLM-based products to production: prompt architecture, conversation state machines, RAG/retrieval, evals, moderation and safety handling - not just API calls

• Strong backend engineering: Python, FastAPI (or similar), SQL/PostgreSQL, AWS; comfortable owning infrastructure, CI/CD and production operations solo

• Solid React Native and React: can ship and debug on both iOS and Android, including in-app purchase flows on both stores and Stripe on web

• Demonstrated AI-first development practice: daily use of agentic coding tools, with the judgement to review and own what they produce

• Product sensibility: a genuine eye for mobile and web UX; you notice broken layouts, bad copy and clumsy flows, and fix them

• Self-sufficient operator: track record of owning a product or major system end-to-end with minimal technical oversight; excellent written communication for a non-technical founder

• Care with sensitive data: experience (or demonstrable seriousness) with privacy, security and access controls around personal/health data

Nice to have

• Experience in mental health, health tech or other regulated/safety-critical consumer products

• Experience taking over a codebase from an agency or departing team

• Mobile release operations: App Store / Play Store review cycles, promo codes, staged rollouts

• Analytics and growth tooling: AppsFlyer, GA4, event taxonomy design, experiment frameworks

• Voice features (TTS/STT), push notification strategy, CRM/email platform integrations

Our stack

Backend: Python 3.12, FastAPI, GraphQL (Strawberry), SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL. Mobile: React Native. Web: React. Hosting: AWS Sydney. AI: OpenAI (plus OpenAI Moderation), Pinecone vector DB. Mobile services: Firebase. Payments: App Store, Google Play, Stripe. Analytics: AppsFlyer, GA4, Meta Pixel. Code: Bitbucket. Admin: SQLAdmin-based panel.

Reporting and working style

You report directly to the founder, who is not technical. You will get clear product direction, fast decisions and clinical/legal guardrails from the Founders team - and full ownership of how it gets built. You plan and manage your own process and keep the founder informed in plain language: what you're doing, why, what it costs, and when it lands.

Benefits

• Flexibility in work hours and location, with a focus on managing energy rather than time.

• Access to online learning platforms and a budget for professional development

• A collaborative, no-silos environment, encouraging learning and growth across teams

• A dynamic social culture with team lunches, social events, and opportunities for creative input

• Health insurance

• Leave Benefits

If you possess the required skills and are eager to contribute to our team's success, we encourage you to apply for this exciting opportunity. Apply now!

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