Founding Engineer
6 days ago
London
Our client, Hesta Health, is reimagining women's healthcare starting with postnatal care. Women spend approximately 25% more of their lives in ill health than men, representing a $1 trillion annual lost opportunity globally. Hesta is changing that, and they want a brilliant engineer to help build it. Fresh from closing their seed round, they're hiring their first Founding Engineer. You'll be the technical backbone of the company — working directly with two exceptional co-founders and their founding team to ship Hesta v1 and lay the foundations for what comes next. The Role This is a rare chance to join a mission-driven healthtech startup at day zero and own the entire technical build. You'll work across the stack — frontend, backend, infrastructure — while embedding clinical-grade reliability, data privacy, and AI capabilities from the ground up. What you'll own: • Build end-to-end product features across the full stack (frontend, backend, infra), • Integrate AI/ML capabilities — risk stratification, smart triage, personalisation, • Build privacy-first, regulatory-compliant infrastructure (UK GDPR, NHS DSPT, MHRA), • Shape and evolve the architecture and technical foundations as the company scales, • Establish a lightweight QMS to enable audit-readiness and regulatory compliance, • Contribute to a fast, iterative product loop — design, ship, learn Who You Are Essential: • 5+ years in high-impact, early-stage product teams: you've shipped and scaled full stack products, • Strong backend (Node.js, Python/Flask, FastAPI) and frontend (React, Next.js, Vue) fundamentals, • ML/data science proficiency: Python, SQL, pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch/TensorFlow, • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), • Proven ability to build data-secure, privacy-compliant infrastructure, • Product-minded: you think in outcomes, not just code, • Startup-ready: resourceful, comfortable with ambiguity, bias to action Bonus: • Experience in women's health, digital therapeutics, or regulated healthtech, • Deployed LLMs or predictive models in production environments, • Familiarity with FHIR, HL7, or secure health data pipelines, • Hands-on LLM work: prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA) The Package • Competitive salary + meaningful equity, • Work directly with and be mentored by two highly experienced co-founders, • Spacious office in Victoria (bike storage, changing facilities, good coffee), • 25 days annual leave + public holidays, • Immediate, company-defining impact — this is day zero Interview Process • Values & Competencies interview (1 hour, virtual), • Technical interview — 90 mins (45 min chat + 45 min live task), • Final 2-hour in-person interview with co-founders Hesta strongly encourages applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Interested? Reach out to Kelly Gauthier () or George Alexander ()