Tech Lead/CTO-to-be

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 it matters to users.
• English — Intermediate+ for documentation and distributed team communication.

Tech Stack

Backend

• Python 3.12, FastAPI, Uvicorn.
• PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy async, Alembic.
• Pydantic, JWT auth, Google / Apple Sign-In.
• OpenAI API for chat and safety workflows.
• Background jobs, push notifications, email, PDF reports.
• Docker, Docker Compose, DigitalOcean App Platform.
• Metrics, structured logging, production monitoring.

AI Services

• Python 3.12, FastAPI.
• PostgreSQL + pgvector.
• RAG pipelines over clinical content.
• OpenAI Responses API, structured Pydantic outputs.
• Deterministic LLM pipelines instead of heavy agent frameworks.
• In-Postgres job queue and outbox-based webhook bus.
• OpenTelemetry, Prometheus.
• Clinical decision base editable by experts.
• Strong focus on AI safety, evals, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

Mobile

• Native iOS with SwiftUI.
• Kotlin Multiplatform shared business layer.
• ktor-client, kotlinx.serialization, SQLDelight.
• HealthKit integration.
• APNs, Apple Sign-In, Google Sign-In.
• Analytics, diagnostics, feature flags.
• Xcode Cloud / CI/CD.
• Android support planned later via existing KMP scaffolding.

Nice to Have

• Experience in HealthTech, mental health, wellness, or regulated consumer products.
• Experience building products from zero to one.
• Work with sensitive personal, medical, or behavioural data.
• Knowledge of HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, or similar frameworks.
• Experience with AI safety, LLM evaluation, guardrails, or prompt-injection defence.
• Deep RAG experience: retrieval quality, chunking, citations, structured outputs.
• Native iOS, KMP, HealthKit, or mobile performance experience.
• Observability experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Sentry, or similar.
• Interest in mental health, psychiatry, therapy, digital care, or AI-assisted health products.

Perks: Why join us

• Build a product that can improve the antidepressant treatment journey for millions of people.
• Join early and influence architecture, product direction, and engineering culture.
• High ownership, low bureaucracy, and direct access to leadership.
• Small, strong technical team and experienced CTO.
• No legacy systems and no bloated technology zoo - we make deliberate technical choices.
• Work at the intersection of AI, mental health, consumer product, and clinical support.
• Future equity/option benefits.