Founding Software Engineer

Join a funded startup, building an AI co-pilot for child development.

Type of role:
Full-time

Location:
Sydney, Melbourne

Pay:
Salary + Equity

Working style:
Hybrid, In the office

Team size: 4

Company's funding stage:
Pre-seed

About the company

We're a shared AI co-pilot for child development - built to support the parents, carers, and clinicians navigating complex health journeys with kids who don't fit the mould.

We take messy, unstructured real-life data and turn it into a structured, living record of a child - one that can be visualised, shared, and actioned by everyone in their world. From that single source of truth, our product generates custom artefacts and communication tools tailored to each part of the care team: educators, therapists, doctors, support workers. This unlocks clarity, coordination, and earlier intervention.

At the same time, we're building our product as a true companion for parents - helping reduce the mental load, support emotional wellbeing, and remind them they're not in this alone.

We're a lean, fast-moving team based in Melbourne & Sydney, building hand-in-hand with the families and clinicians we serve. Our culture is high-trust, low-ego, and unapologetically mission-led. We hire people who care - about impact, pace, and doing their best work in an environment that values initiative, inclusion, and humanity.

We're not building a typical startup team. We're building one that feels like our product: diverse, kind, emotionally intelligent, and bold enough to redesign the system, not just digitise it.

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About the job

We're looking for our founding engineer to help us build and maintain our core AI product and intelligence in the health-tech space. The ideal candidate will have a passion for delivering reliable, scalable product that can have global impact and is compliant + robust. Curiosity about cross platform AI cloud applications is a must

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Why this role matters

As our founding engineer, you'll set the tone for how we deliver trust and reliability at our company so all parents can trust us with their child's story. You'll not only shape our product, but also our culture of engineering, influencing how our company grows and how families experience developmental healthcare.

Spike:
 We're not just looking for someone who can ship code fast (lots of people can do that), but someone who has a rare ability to design and build backend systems that are simultaneously fast-moving and compliant, secure, and resilient. This is about setting foundations that build a generational startup.

This is a founding role. In addition to salary, we offer meaningful equity to reflect the ownership and long-term impact of this position. You will work closely in a team with 4 other stars (including the CTO + CEO), joining a founding team who have successfully raised, built and scaled tech from SafetyCulture, Aus, to LVL (Health-tech), Dubai. With the speed of build, funding and execution we have already created at our company we're on track to be the category leader in Australia, taking that impact globally and your work will scale us there.

Requirements
What you'll do

• Set direction from day one: there's no legacy here. You'll make the key decisions about how we solve problems, manage the codebase, and scale the system. This isn't just about building: it's about owning.
• Architect, build, and maintain scalable features and infrastructure for AI-powered development tools
• Collaborate with team to improve the products capabilities through reliable backend services, shared tools and evals.
• Stay ahead of advancements in AI-native products by experimenting with new tools, evaluating emerging techniques, and tracking enhancements to existing ones
• Contribute across the stack from back-end infrastructure to front end experience to develop new features, fix bugs, and optimise performance
• Engineer with compliance, privacy, and trust at the core ensuring we meet safety and regulatory standards parents and clinicians rely on and trust us for.

Our stack includes

• Python, Supabase, , ReactNative
• Cloud infra , Docker, Postgres)
• AI tooling (LangGraph, OpenAI API, custom evals)

You may be a good fit if you:

• Are excited about AI-native applications that challenge how parents navigate developmental journeys for their kids - to enable not replace allied health and paediatric care.
• Spend a lot of time refining and customising your own AI workflows, setting practice for improved developer productivity and acceleration
• Have experience deploying and optimising cloud infrastructure + compliant systems
• Are an expert in backend/infrastructure focus (Python, cloud infra, compliance), with comfort in full-stack (React).
• Specialise in backend engineering but are a capable full stack developer
• Have worked on projects with stringent safety, security and/or compliance requirements
• Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
• Make critical build vs. buy decisions for infrastructure components
• Set technical direction for product infrastructure

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Experience developing for health, education, or family-focused products.
• Deploying frontier AI-native products or shaping new interaction paradigms.
• Pride in reliability and efficient architecture.
• Exposure to early-stage codebases where you've been the first (or one of the first) engineer hire.
• Can balance the speed of a startup environment with the reliability needs of production systems
• Deep expertise scaling PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, or similar database systems
• Experience with Redis, Temporal, RAG databases, or async job processing frameworks

Diversity + inclusion

At our company, we're building a team that reflects the families we serve: diverse in background, identity, and lived experience. Part of that commitment means making sure our hiring process is fair and inclusive.

Our promise: Our company is unapologetically mission-led. We believe the same diversity that makes every child unique is what makes our team stronger. Sharing your identity is always your choice.

This is a full-time role — but if 3 or 4 days a week works better for your life, we're open to that.

We care more about finding the right person than strict hours, and we know some of the best talent doesn't always fit a full-time mould. If that's you, apply anyway — we'd love to chat.

We're looking for an amazing Engineer and never want work life balance to be a barrier. If you're an amazing Engineer and need flexibility we're still open to chat. We're built by parents that get it.