Founding Software Engineer

Overview Join a funded startup, building an AI co-pilot for child development.
We are a lean, fast-moving team focused on reducing the mental load for parents, carers, and clinicians navigating complex health journeys with kids who don't fit the mould.Type of role: Full-time.
Location: Sydney, Melbourne.
Pay: Salary + Equity.
Working style: Hybrid, In the office.
Team size: 4.
Company funding stage: Pre-seed.About the company We're a shared AI co-pilot for child development that turns messy, unstructured real-life data into a structured, living record of a child.
This single source of truth can be visualised, shared, and actioned by educators, therapists, doctors, and support workers.
Our product aims to unlock clarity, coordination, and earlier intervention while supporting parents' emotional wellbeing.We are based in Melbourne and Sydney, building hand-in-hand with families and clinicians.
Our culture is high-trust, low-ego, and mission-led.
We value initiative, inclusion, and humanity, and strive to build a diverse, kind, emotionally intelligent team.About the job We are looking for our founding engineer to help build and maintain our core AI product and intelligence in the health-tech space.
The ideal candidate has a passion for delivering reliable, scalable products with global impact and is curious about cross-platform AI cloud applications.Why this role matters As our founding engineer, you'll set the tone for trust and reliability so parents can trust us with their child's story.
You'll shape our product and our engineering culture, influencing how the company grows and how families experience developmental healthcare.Spike: This role is about designing and building backend systems that are fast-moving, compliant, secure, and resilient—foundations for a generational startup.This is a founding role with meaningful equity and close collaboration with a founding team that has raised and scaled tech before.
Your work will help us scale globally and become a category leader in Australia and beyond.Responsibilities Set direction from day one: make key decisions about how we solve problems, manage the codebase, and scale the system.Architect, build, and maintain scalable features and infrastructure for AI-powered development tools.Collaborate to improve product capabilities through reliable backend services, shared tools, and evaluations.Stay ahead of AI-native product developments by experimenting with new tools and techniques.Contribute across the stack to develop new features, fix bugs, and optimise performance.Engineer with compliance, privacy, and trust at the core to meet safety and regulatory standards for parents and clinicians.Requirements / What you'll do Set technical direction for product infrastructure and scale the system from day one.Architect, build, and maintain backend and infrastructure supporting AI-powered development tools.Collaborate with team to improve capabilities and reliability of backend services and evaluation tools.Continuously learn and apply AI-native advancements; evaluate emerging techniques.Work across the stack to deliver features, fix issues, and optimise performance.Ensure compliance, privacy, and safety standards are integrated into design and implementation.Our stack includes Python, Supabase, React/Next.js, ReactNativeCloud infra (Fly.io, Docker, Postgres)AI tooling (LangGraph, OpenAI API, custom evals)You may be a good fit if you Are excited about AI-native applications that support families and allied health without replacing care providers.Refine and customise AI workflows to improve developer productivity and product acceleration.Have experience deploying and optimising cloud infrastructure with compliance.Are an expert in backend/infrastructure (Python, cloud infra, compliance) with comfort in full-stack (React).
Specialise in backend engineering but are capable across the stack; have worked on projects with safety, security, or compliance requirements.Care about societal impacts and ethics of your work; can balance startup speed with reliability.Experience with decision-making for infrastructure components and technical direction for product infrastructure.Strong candidates may also have Experience developing for health, education, or family-focused products.Experience deploying frontier AI-native products or new interaction paradigms.Reliability-focused architecture and scale experience with databases like PostgreSQL/MySQL/DynamoDB; familiarity with Redis, Temporal, RAG databases, or async job processing.Diversity and inclusion We're building a team that reflects the families we serve.
We are committed to fair and inclusive hiring, and sharing your identity is your choice.
We offer flexibility (3–4 days a week) if that better suits you, and we value the right person over strict hours.Employment type Full-timeLocation Sydney, Melbourne#J-18808-Ljbffr