[Remote] Founding Engineer / Head of Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Poppins, Inc. is an AI-native concierge platform focused on supporting working parents by integrating pediatric medical care and behavioral coaching. They are seeking a Founding Engineer to take ownership of their proprietary platform, leading its development and scaling the engineering team while ensuring clinical safety and compliance.

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering roadmap and technical strategy, translating company goals into a plan you and your team execute against
• Architect and build our proprietary, HIPAA-compliant backend, migrating off MVP third-party solutions while maintaining service quality and zero disruption to families
• Design and ship agentic AI workflows on the Anthropic Claude API and Claude Agent SDK — triage, documentation, follow-up, and upsell agents running in parallel with human-in-the-loop oversight
• Build and tune our retrieval layer (PostgreSQL with pgvector and pgcrypto, Voyage embeddings) over curated clinical protocols and our proprietary message dataset
• Implement robust escalation, PII masking, and data governance so AI guidance is safe, auditable, and clinically appropriate
• Drive our SOC 2 compliance effort, which is a near-term priority — implementing the security controls, evidence collection, and audit-readiness processes we need, working alongside our external audit partner and on top of our existing HIPAA posture
• Stand up the engineering foundations — horizontally scaling app servers, CI/CD, observability, testing — to scale from hundreds to thousands of families
• Build and ship our cross-platform mobile experience (iOS and Android) in React Native, bringing our whole-family care model to parents on the go
• Hire, mentor, and lead the engineering team from its earliest members, setting technical standards, processes, and culture as we grow
• Partner with clinical leadership to translate evidence-based protocols into reliable, measurable agent behavior
• Stay hands-on in the codebase as a core contributor — leading by example on the hardest technical problems. You'll be writing code alongside our two engineers based abroad, not stepping away from it

Skills

• A seasoned engineer with 8+ years building production software and a track record of shipping and scaling systems from 0 to 1 — you've owned technical direction, not just executed it
• You love the startup environment and have thrived in it before — comfortable with ambiguity, fast iteration, wearing many hats, and the pace and ownership that come with an early-stage team
• Experience building and leading a team: you've hired, mentored, and set standards, and you're ready to grow an engineering org from its earliest members
• Direct experience building in healthcare — fluency with HIPAA, PHI handling, BAAs, and the safety and compliance demands of clinical software. You can own the engineering side of a SOC 2 effort — implementing controls, evidence, and processes in partnership with our audit firm — whether or not you've done a formal audit before
• A strong AI/ML background with direct, hands-on experience building on the Anthropic Claude API and Claude Agent SDK in production — this is core to our stack and to the role
• Proven ability to ship agentic AI workflows: LLM orchestration, RAG / vector search, and prompt and evaluation pipelines running reliably in production
• Coding-first: you write production code every day and want to stay that way. This is the core of the role, not an occasional add-on
• Experience taking systems from early stage to meaningful scale, and the operational instincts to keep them reliable as they grow
• Exposure to insurance / payor integrations and clinical documentation workflows
• Experience as a first or early engineering leader at a venture-backed startup
• Comfort with our current stack — Ruby on Linux, PostgreSQL/pgvector, React Native, AWS + Render, GitHub
• A bias for action in ambiguity and a deep commitment to quality where mistakes carry real clinical consequences

Benefits

• Equity

Company Overview

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