Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer (Equity-Based), Tahoma AI Remote (US) · Full-time · Seattle or Austin in-person optional Tahoma is live in production with paying healthcare customers, and we are hiring one founding engineer to own the entire platform. This is an equity-based founding role: no cash salary until our next funding milestone, and founding-level ownership in exchange. We put that first because the right person for this seat is building a company, not taking a job, and deserves the facts before the pitch. What we do Healthcare billing runs on systems that were never built to talk to software. Tahoma builds AI agents that operate those systems reliably at scale, and our customers measure the result in dollars recovered. Reliability is the entire product. When an agent is wrong, a provider does not get paid. The role You own the core platform: agent runtime, workflow engine, and the infrastructure beneath them. You design it, write the hardest parts yourself, and set the technical bar for every engineer who follows. You work directly with the founders, with an engineering team already in place to build your designs. What you will do Architect and build the platform every customer workflow depends onBuild production agents that operate legacy healthcare systems with the consistency of a trained operatorMake the hard calls on failure recovery, correctness guarantees, and scaleDirect, review, and test AI-assisted code so velocity never costs qualityTake a customer problem from root cause to shipped fix, end to endOwn production: testing, CI/CD, observability, and design documentation How we build TypeScript and Node.js, browser automation and computer-use agents, frontier LLMs behind a deterministic control layer, PostgreSQL and containerized cloud infrastructure, HIPAA-grade security. Compensation and benefits Founding equity: to be discussed; fully diluted, four-year vest, one-year cliffCash salary: none during the founding period. Market-rate salary begins at our next priced round, with the founding engineer first in lineBenefits: none at this stage; health coverage and standard benefits begin with cash compensationFull transparency on cap table and terms in the first conversation You are a fit if You have shipped systems that real revenue depended onYou are highly productive steering AI-assisted code and know when not to trust itYou have set direction for other engineers and still write the hard code yourselfYou reason from first principles and can defend a tradeoff in a design doc people readYou have built distributed systems that held up under real loadYou have automated real business workflows end to endYou work well async across time zonesYou build tests and observability because you have lived without them Technical requirements Full-stack experience with real backend depth: APIs, data models, and services running in productionStrong TypeScript and Node.jsProduction experience building with LLMs, including evaluation and knowing when not to use a modelBrowser automation and browser APIs, such as Playwright, Chromium, or extension APIsAzure familiarity (strong AWS or GCP experience transfers) Healthcare or RCM experience, and experience with computer-use agents or legacy desktop and terminal automation, are welcome. This is not the role if You want to move out of hands-on engineeringYou want someone else to set technical directionYou need cash compensation from day one Who you will work with Founders with deep healthcare operations and enterprise technology backgrounds, and a small advisory group spanning AI research and large-scale platform engineering. How we hire Intro call within three business days. One technical session on a real problem from our codebase. One founder conversation. Decision within two weeks. No take-home longer than two hours. How to apply Apply through LinkedIn or email careers@tahoma.io with the following: Your resumeA cover letter, one page at most, on why you believe you are the best person for this role and what you would build firstOne thing you have shipped: a repo, a system, or a write-up We read every cover letter. The strongest ones tell us how you think, not how many years you have. Applications accepted through 31, October 2026 or until filled. Tahoma is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.