Founding Engineer

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We build in the deep end with sensitive health data. There is zero room for error. We’re selective by design. If you join, you get founder-level upside, the sharpest tools, and real career compression. What takes 10 years elsewhere happens here in 12 to 18 months. You’ll raise our velocity, and we’ll raise your ceiling.

Every decision matters

A bug doesn’t just break features, it breaks trust. A performance regression doesn’t just slow things down; it can delay care. This isn’t a job; it’s a founding role with founding stakes.

How you operate

High agency, low ego: insight → plan → ship, fast. You create momentum and clarity.

First principles: start from constraints, reason about trade-offs, decide, and document.

Systems taste: simple cores; sharp, modern tools only where they compound.

Clear communicator: crisp RFCs, diagrams, and postmortems that drive decisions.

Relentless execution: compress years into months without losing judgment or quality.

Secure by default: threat models, least privilege, encryption, auditable trails.

Builder operator: You ship it and you run it. SLOs, cost, performance, and reliability.

What you’ll do

Build, break, learn, and ship across core product, internal platforms, and high upside experiments.

Turn ambiguity into working services, APIs, and UIs with clean boundaries and clear ownership.

Own end-to-end: data models, security posture, UX, reliability, performance, and cost.

Prototype in days, harden in weeks, scale in months. Kill weak ideas quickly and double down on winners.

Instrument everything: metrics, traces, logs, and audits wired into CI/CD and SLO gates.

Create the paved road: reproducible dev envs, templates, generators, and guardrails that 10x throughput.

Operate with safety: feature flags, canaries, shadow traffic, chaos drills, and one-click rollbacks.

Optimise hot paths: shrink p99s, remove 30 to 50% latency, and cut waste without adding complexity.

Lead incidents well: contain, communicate, recover, write the postmortem, and fix the root cause.

Shape the team: define standards, run tight interviews, build a culture of taste and speed.

Non negotiable

3+ years shipping production systems at real scale (1M+ MAU, 10k+ RPS, or TB per day pipelines) with end-to-end ownership.

Distributed systems mastery: explain and apply Raft or Paxos, CRDTs, vector clocks, backpressure, idempotency, and exactly once semantics; choose consistency models with intent.

Regulated environments: shipped in healthcare, fintech, or payments; implemented HIPAA, ABDM, PCI, or RBI controls, data residency, and passed audits.

Security first engineering: threat modelling, mTLS, key rotation, tokenisation, least privilege IAM; you spot data leak risks in reviews.

SRE discipline: define SLIs and SLOs, lead incidents, write postmortems that drive fixes, design for graceful degradation.

Measurable 10x wins with evidence: for example, p99 1s → 200 ms, 50%+ cost reductions, or 10x throughput without reliability loss.

Range across the stack: backend, infra, and modern frontend; you can own a feature from RFC to prod and take on a call.

Clear writing: docs and diagrams that non-engineers and auditors can understand.

Differentiators

PII or PHI at scale with provable controls: RLS, tenant isolation, tokenisation or deterministic encryption, retention and deletion workflows, immutable audit trails.

OSS impact: meaningful PRs or maintainer roles in PostHog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Kafka or Redpanda, Envoy, Temporal, Kubernetes, Sentry, Qdrant or pgvector.

Published depth: papers, conference talks, or a serious blog series on systems, performance, security, or data platforms.

India regulatory exposure: DPDP, ABDM or FHIR, NPCI or