Founding Software Engineer

About Alpaca Health

Alpaca Health empowers autism care providers to deliver the highest quality ABA services. We fully manage non-clinical admin functions (ie scheduling, intake, billing, documentation, and more), so providers at Alpaca-powered clinics can focus 100% on what they do best: clinical care.

We're growing quickly and well-capitalized, having raised $4M+ from leading VCs like Adverb Ventures and South Park Commons.

Your Role

We’re looking for passionate, ambitious, and product-minded software engineers to join us as builders. You’ll build unparalleled new experience for our clinician partners.

In this role, you will own a core module of our platform by:

• Understanding the customer 'why'. You will join customer calls to understand pain points, conduct live user testing feedback, and collaborate with our CEO Michael to establish a product roadmap for your module.

• Brainstorming the product 'what'. You'll identify core requirements, ruthlessly prioritize, and brainstorm solutions with the entire team. You'll maintain your own bug backlog and be your own module's worst critic.

• Owning the full-stack engineering 'how'. You'll build new modules from scratch, owning the entire technology stack, while ensuring data security and compliance with healthcare industry standards.

You might ask, "isn't this what a product manager, designer, and QA does?" Maybe some day. Today, our engineers will drive product development from end-to-end.

You’ll have the opportunity to help shape our technology choices, but today our stack is:

• Front End: Typescript, React, NextJS, Tailwind CSS

• Back End: MongoDB, Python, FastAPI, Google Cloud Storage

• LLM: Gemini Pro, OpenAI

Why join?

• Accelerate your career. We promise that your time at Alpaca Health will be the most intense learning opportunity of your entire career. With exposure to everyone function at the company, you'll never learn more in such a short amount of time.

• Be a real owner. As a Founding Engineer, you will be a core part of our company. We reflect this through competitive compensation packages with company equity that will give you a meaningful change to make a big sum of money. Specifically this means:

  • Cash Comp: $120,000 to $180,000
  • Equity Comp: 0.5% to 5%

• Supporting your wellbeing. We provide benefits to allow you to do your best work:

• Unlimited paid-time-off (PTO)

• Competitive health insurance

• 401k plan

• Free dinner when working past 8pm

• Commuter benefits

Who We’re Looking For

We have an ambitious vision and many clinicians who are relying on us to deliver. There's often no substitute for long hours and intensity at a company of our stage. This means that this job won't be right for everyone, but could be right for you if:

You believe in in-person work. We believe in the power of in-person collaboration, which is why we will have a strong habit of working together in our New York City office.

You enjoy owning product, not just writing code. Your interested in joining customer conversations and have opinions about what to build and when to build it. If you're looking to join neat sprints and execute on well thought-out tickets, this might not be the best fit for you.

You love asking questions, even if you don't have many answers (yet). You may not have personal experience with autism care, but you already have so many questions that you're feverishly on Google or ChatGPT trying to figure out.

You have a strong track record of bringing products to life from 0 to 1. We are focused on foundational leaps, not incremental improvements.

You enjoy autonomy and can bring order to ambiguity. You like answering open-ended questions and see dozens of solutions when others only see one. Uncertainty brings you curiosity, not fear.

You're ambitious and want to leverage an early-stage opportunity to learn new skills, rapidly. This can be anything -- new technical frameworks, selling to customers, standardizing processes, or more! If you have ambitions to start your own company one day, we hope that Alpaca Health will catalyze your journey.

You are a force of nature. We work 60-80 hours with a strong in-office culture. You cringe when you hear the words "that's not possible". You set the bar higher for everybody around you.

What will I work on?

As an early Engineer on our team, you’ll have a chance to work on tricky problems that plague ABA clinics.

Scheduling – This is not your standard scheduling software. There are two tiers of professionals in ABA clinics – BCBAs who supervise RBTs and the care of clients. An RBT can work with different clients who are supervised by different BCBAs. RBTs need to be supervised 20% of the time. Each client also needs to be supervised 20% of the time. You can start to see how scheduling is tricky…

Clinical Data Collection – ABA is a data-driven field. This means that in every session, RBTs need to track the frequency, duration, and occurrence of different behaviors. Sessions can be chaotic – imagine many kids screaming and running around, while the RBT tries to deliver therapy and track interactions.

Manual Workflows Desperate for Automation – When a client calls out, an RBT needs to be informed and payroll adjusted. When a client is late, the time billed to insurance needs to be adjusted, but payroll for the RBT stays the same (in most clinics – not all). There are a lot of these “if, then” conditions and configurations in back office workflows. Existing tools hide these conditions in convoluted settings pages – there must be a better way.

Building Technology for Non-Tech Savvy Audiences - ABA clinics are fueled by paraprofessional Behavior Technicians that are usually not well trained and certainly not tech-savvy. EHRs that take a lifetime to learn only add to the paperwork burden on clinicians.