Founding Engineer

Job description

The gap no one has filled Every complex system in America has a profession whose job it is to be your trusted guide. You have a lawyer for legal. An accountant for taxes. A financial advisor for your money. Healthcare, a trillion-dollar industry that's arguably the most complex and touches every single family, leaves us on our own. 99% of care happens when someone steps outside the four walls of a doctor's office. Hera is creating a new profession in healthcare to fill that gap: the Hero, a dedicated senior care expert for your family. Our Heroes educate, coordinate, and advocate for the most vulnerable population in the healthcare system. We’re covered by insurance, so we can serve every family in America. Building the most trusted interface of healthcare We are in the business of trust. We're designing for the most emotionally charged moments of our customers' lives. The bar isn't just delight, it's trust. Hera's brand promise is simple: care that would only be great enough for our own parents. This promise is our moat. It's what physicians refer to, families buy, what Heroes deliver, and what the product must unlock and enforce at every touchpoint. The supply challenge There aren't enough experts to serve every family who needs us. The bottleneck isn't demand, it's supply. In order to scale to all of America, we need to unbundle expertise from the human and broaden the aperture of who can become a Hero. Anyone that can foster human connection should be able to become a Hero with Hera. In that world, our supply challenge becomes how we uphold our brand promise across every touchpoint with our customers. Our product challenge We believe the best software is invisible. We serve people most technology overlooks: social workers, nurses, aging parents, and their families. Every interaction builds or breaks trust, so our product must help Heroes deliver expert-level care at every moment. Healthcare navigation depends on tribal knowledge. One social worker knows how to expedite Medicaid in New York, while another knows which physical therapist families trust. This expertise is valuable but fragmented. We are building the product that brings it together. Our platform captures interactions, solved problems, and insights from expert care managers, turning them into shared intelligence. Over time, this knowledge helps every user make better decisions and enables people with limited healthcare experience to work with the judgment of seasoned professionals. The goal is to build a trusted knowledge system that understands what is reliable, current, local, and relevant, then surfaces the right insight at the right time. Our founding team We closed a 7M seed round led by Accel and 10’xed revenue over the last 6 months organically through close partnerships with Weill Cornell, NYU Langone, and Mount Sinai. We’ve been doing fun things in the community along the way (threw an art show for an 88 year old artist that went viral https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2026/02/19/88-year-old-brooklyn-painter-sells-art-for-the-first-time) and the customer feedback is the most positive our team has seen in our careers. You’ll build Hera alongside co-founders Jenny https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennydlee/, Myles https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylesnovick/ & Connie https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingyi-connie-kang/ and a team from Headway and Palantir. We are in person in NYC. Read our story and watch our launch video here https://hellohera.com/about. In a world of growing cynicism we chase hard truths, give a damn, and build. Our entire team believes truth is in the field. This means we are side by side with our Heroes everyday, learning what it takes to do the job and do it well. We are high autonomy and trust. There is no space for micromanagement, if you see a problem or think of a solution, you are empowered to run at it wholeheartedly and know that the team has your back. We are creative in our bones. For the first time in many years, we are seeing the genesis of a new profession of a profound scale and importance; it’s on us to define what it can and should look like. Join our Founding Team to impact real lives We are looking for ambitious and relentless engineers to join us on this mission. Whereas at other companies you may be working on the next widget, analytics suite, dev tooling, or b2b revolution, what we are trying to do is as tangible as it gets. We serve the everyday people in society that are most sorely in need of help and who have been least addressed by the technological revolution and developer brainpower of the past decades. We want to bring the highest quality builders to bear on this. When you solve a hard problem, you will know that you’ve empowered some of the most selfless members of our society to tangibly impact the lives of some of those most in need. You will also be rewarded with harder problems. Our promise is we will stretch your limits, and trust you to own unreasonably substantial outcomes. The role We are hiring for a founding software engineer to help build Hera end to end, spanning the backend systems and frontend experiences that power our care platform. This is a founding role for an engineer who cares deeply about sound systems design, product quality, thoughtful user experience, and getting the details right in an environment where trust, data sensitivity, and operational correctness matter. What you'll do - Design and build core backend systems. You will architect and implement the infrastructure, services, APIs, and internal platform capabilities that underpin Hera’s product and operations. - Own and build core frontend product experiences. You will design and implement key workflows across Hera’s product and help shape how the platform feels and functions day to day. - Build for reliability and correctness. You will create systems that are fault-tolerant, idempotent, and thoughtfully designed to handle sensitive workflows safely. - Translate craft and taste into product quality. You will bring a strong point of view on interaction design, UI polish, and overall product quality, and hold a high standard for what ships. - Work closely with users. You will stay grounded in the lived reality of Heroes, families, and internal users, and use those insights to build with context rather than in a vacuum. - Own critical data and infrastructure decisions. You will help shape how Hera handles complex workflows involving medical, billing, operational, and user data across the platform. - Help set engineering standards. You will contribute to code quality, system cleanliness, testing, performance, service architecture, and a thoughtful engineering culture as an early member of the team. - Operate with high autonomy. You will identify opportunities, move quickly, and take ownership without needing heavy direction or hand-holding. What we are looking for - Strong backend, infrastructure, and frontend fundamentals. You have experience designing sound systems and building high-quality product experiences with strong performance, maintainability, and attention to detail. - Design-minded product strength. You have a clear appreciation for product craft, interaction design, UI polish, and user experience. - Taste and creativity. You have experience building products that feel intentional and polished, and you care deeply about how software looks and feels. - User proximity. You are excited by direct engagement with users and want to build informed by real-world behavior and needs. - Security and compliance awareness. Experience working with permissions, role-based access controls, security-sensitive flows, compliance-minded systems, or other trust-critical infrastructure is a major plus. - Ownership and autonomy. You are self-directed, opinionated in a healthy way, and excited to take responsibility for major technical and product decisions as an early engineer. - Relevant technical fluency. TypeScript, React, Next.js, AWS or similar cloud infrastructure, SQL and non-SQL databases, consumer-scale APIs, SDKs, service-oriented architecture, and comfort with modern AI-native workflows are all highly relevant. Compensation We pay at the top of market with founding-level equity. People who deliver outsized outcomes should be rewarded with outsized upside.