Tech Lead/CTO-to-be

Company: Pink Elephant Location: Lisbon, Portugal Employment type: FULL_TIME Salary: 600,000–900,000 RUB MONTH

Pink Elephant builds infrastructure of products at the frontier of mental health on EU&US markets.

Mental health is a global crisis hiding in plain sight. Nearly 1 in 8 people live with a mental disorder. Depression and anxiety alone strip $1 trillion from the global economy every year. Conventional treatment leaves most patients cycling through mediocre solutions for years - undertreated, undersupported, and underinformed. Progressive therapies are showing results up to 10 times more effective than standard care. Yet fewer than 5% of people can access them.

We're here to close that gap.

A big part of our portfolio is everyday mental healthcare - mental health diagnostics, antidepressant journeys, the unmet clinical touchpoints, the patients who leave a 20-minute appointment with a prescription and no roadmap.

The Product

Claro - an early-stage AI mental health product supporting people taking antidepressants. The product helps users track progress, understand side effects, prepare for doctor visits, and make the treatment journey clearer and less isolating.

Today Claro includes three core engineering domains:

• Backend - patient-facing FastAPI backend for auth, onboarding, check-ins, chat, reports, notifications, and admin tools.
• AI Services - AI recommendation engine with RAG-grounded LLM pipelines, clinical decision logic, job processing, and safety guardrails.
• Mobile - native iOS app built with SwiftUI and a Kotlin Multiplatform shared business layer.

We are building at the intersection of consumer health, clinical workflows, AI companionship, and sensitive personal data.

The Role

We are looking for a hands-on Tech Lead to own Claro’s core engineering domains: backend, AI services, or mobile, with simultaneous focus on 1-2 of those.

This is not a purely managerial role. You will write code, make architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and work closely with product, design, clinical, and leadership teams.

You will report to the CPO and work closely with the CTO and founding team.

Responsibilities: What you drive

• Own technical direction, architecture, and delivery quality within your domain.
• Write production code regularly - around 40–60% hands-on.
• Lead and mentor a team of 3-4 engineers - and scale it further timely.
• Turn product goals into clear engineering plans together with PM, CPO, and CTO.
• Make pragmatic technical decisions for an early-stage, high-trust health product.
• Own quality: tests, observability, performance, security, and production reliability.
• Help build systems that handle sensitive mental health data responsibly.
• Drive engineering rituals: planning, estimations, retrospectives, design reviews, ADRs.
• Participate in hiring and onboarding.
• Work with AI and clinical teams to integrate LLM features safely into user-facing workflows.

Experience: What you bring

• 5+ years of commercial software engineering experience.
• 1.5+ years as a Tech Lead, Team Lead, Staff Engineer, or Senior Engineer with leadership responsibilities.
• Strong hands-on expertise in at least one of: Python backend, Python AI services, native iOS / Kotlin Multiplatform mobile.
• Experience building SaaS, mobile, consumer health, or other products with real users.
• Strong ownership mindset - from backlog breakdown to deployment, monitoring, and support.
• Ability to work in early-stage ambiguity, make trade-offs, and move fast without sacrificing quality.
• Solid architecture fundamentals: APIs, databases, queues, integrations, reliability patterns.
• Comfortable with Docker, CI/CD, cloud deployments, and production operations.
• Understanding of security, privacy, and sensitive data handling — or willingness to learn fast.
• Product thinking: you care not only about how the system works, but why.