Lead Software Engineer — AI/VR-Based Healthcare Conversational Intake Platform

AugMend Health is building a VR-based healthcare intake platform that helps patients share their information in an immersive environment. Patients complete a conversational intake in a VR environment with an AI avatar asking questions and collecting data; the system turns that data into a structured patient report and delivers it to a secure portal where clinicians log in to view, edit, and manage it.

We are looking for a hands-on Lead Engineer to own the software that makes this work end to end: the backend that powers the intake conversation, the AI integration that generates the reports, the provider portal clinicians rely on, and the integration of all of it into the VR experience. You will work alongside a small cross-functional team, including our VR designer, who owns the Unreal environments and exercises (you will bring the intake experience to life inside them), and an experienced systems administrator who owns our cloud infrastructure and DevOps. Today he stretches across infrastructure, CI/CD, databases, backend, frontend, and security all at once — by taking ownership of backend and frontend production work, you will lift that load so he can focus where he is strongest.

This role reports directly to the Chief Operating Officer. You will also work closely with our data engineer/analyst and with the clinicians who use the platform.

This is a build-it role, not a maintain-it role. You should be energized by owning broad surface area and actually developing and producing the product yourself. This is hands-on engineering — you will be writing the code, not supervising others who write it. To be direct: we need someone who truly builds software through real, rigorous engineering, not someone who assembles a product out of AI-generated code and "vibe coding." You will make practical, production-quality decisions on a small team.

What you'll do

• Bring lead-level judgment to architecture, debugging, security, and scalability decisions
• Communicate clearly with non-technical audiences — research, clinical, and leadership partners — translating technical tradeoffs into terms they can act on
• Build and maintain the backend services that power the intake conversation and turn intake data into structured patient reports
• Work with our existing and in-development algorithm to code the intake process, where handling latency well is a key challenge
• Improve our existing OpenAI integration (LLM, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech) — it's already wired into the product, but the real-time workflows need to be made faster and more reliable
• Work closely with our VR designer on the server-to-headset integration. Today nearly all the logic lives in the server and the VR client is essentially an input/output device — microphone in, audio out — inside the Unreal environment she builds. Your job is to define and own the protocol for sending audio and data between the server and the headset. There's room to take this further if you bring VR skills of your own.
• Refine our existing portal draft and turn the mock-up into a real, reliable application where providers log in to view, edit, and manage patient reports
• Build applications with data security and patient privacy in mind
• Partner with our systems administrator on infrastructure and deployment — primarily by owning the backend and frontend production work that currently competes for his time
• Work closely with our VR designer, systems administrator, product, research, and clinical teams

Required
The core of this role is strong, production-grade backend and frontend engineering — that's the heart of what we need. On top of that, this person needs to be able to share real infrastructure and DevOps work with our systems administrator, who is currently stretched across too much alone.

• 8+ years of hands-on professional software engineering experience, including at least 1 year working with infrastructure. We're counting real industry work — time spent in school or graduate/research programs doesn't count toward this.
• Strong full-stack capability shipped to production: Python backend (real-time / event-driven a plus) and a modern frontend stack (React / TypeScript or similar). This is the heart of the role.
• Experience designing and building APIs and backend services in production
• Experience integrating OpenAI / LLM APIs and general third-party APIs into production applications (our audio is API-based — STT and TTS run through OpenAI, not a custom speech stack)
• Ability to build and maintain a secure, authenticated provider portal (login, role-appropriate access, report viewing and editing)
• Comfortable owning the server-side integration with the VR client — defining and maintaining the protocol for exchanging audio and data with the headset, in close partnership with our VR designer. She owns the Unreal environment, so you don't need to build in-engine; Unreal/VR skills are a plus if you want to push the integration further.
• DevOps / infrastructure collaboration: comfortable enough with AWS, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and deployment to take real work off our systems administrator's plate — not just discuss it. He owns the domain today and is stretched thin; you should be able to share the load.
• HIPAA / PHI awareness and the instinct to make privacy-conscious code and infrastructure decisions
• A deep understanding of designing, debugging, securing, and operating production systems — not just assembling them
• Comfortable owning ambiguity on a small, cross-functional team; collaborative and hands-on

Nice to have

• Meta Quest or other VR headset development experience
• Hands-on Unreal Engine (or Unity) experience beyond integration level
• Deeper DevOps / infrastructure expertise beyond the baseline above — e.g. infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), advanced monitoring/observability, reliability, and cost optimization
• MongoDB / DocumentDB
• Semantic Interoperability for EHR/EMR software via FHIR/HL7 to prepare for 3rd party integrations
• Healthcare, health tech, or other regulated-software experience
• Compliance tooling (Secureframe, Vanta, Drata)
• Experience with patient intake, clinical documentation, or provider-facing workflows

Who you are
A hands-on, humble engineer whose strength is shipping production backend and frontend, and who's comfortable connecting that work to AI integration, the provider portal, and the VR experience. You make practical technical decisions, you communicate clearly with technical and non-technical teammates alike, you care about doing healthcare software right, and you'd rather own a real problem end to end than work a narrow slice of one.

Logistics
Location: Remote. Open to candidates based in LATAM, Eastern Europe, ASEAN.