Head of Engineering

About Arul Health

Arul Health is building the agentic AI platform for navigating chronic and serious illness.

Patients and caregivers managing complex conditions are often forced to coordinate appointments, medications, insurance requirements, clinical information, and next steps across a fragmented healthcare system. Arul turns that complexity into clear, personalized actions—and helps ensure those actions actually get done.

We are an early-stage company and a graduate of Techstars × Northwestern Medicine. With early revenue and active partnerships underway across pharmaceutical companies and major health systems, we have validated a meaningful need and are now building the technical foundation required to scale.

We are still early, which means every hire matters. This is an opportunity to join the founding team, work directly with the founders, and shape a company at the intersection of healthcare, artificial intelligence, and patient advocacy.

We are looking for an exceptional technical leader to serve as the architectural backbone of Arul Health.

The Role

We are hiring a Head of Engineering to own Arul Health’s technical architecture, engineering execution, and technical culture.

This is a high-ownership, principal-level role for someone who can set long-term technical direction while continuing to build hands-on. You will make critical decisions across our application, data, infrastructure, security, and LLM orchestration layers—and then work alongside the team to bring those decisions into production.

You will partner directly with the founders, our founding engineer, and a distributed engineering team. You will also represent Arul in technical conversations with senior stakeholders at health systems, pharmaceutical companies, and other enterprise partners.

This role requires:

Architectural depth. You can design systems across the full stack, anticipate future constraints, and make pragmatic trade-offs among speed, reliability, security, and scalability.

Hands-on technical leadership. You are comfortable moving between system design, code review, production debugging, infrastructure decisions, and direct implementation.

AI fluency. You understand how to build reliable products around large language models, including agent orchestration, evaluation, prompt design, observability, failure handling, and human oversight.

Healthcare-grade rigor. You know how to build secure, auditable systems that can meet the expectations of health systems, pharmaceutical companies, and enterprise security teams.

High standards and high EQ. You can raise the engineering bar, mentor others, navigate disagreements constructively, and create a culture where talented engineers want to do their best work.

This is not a role for someone who wants to manage from a distance. You will set the technical vision, establish the engineering operating system, and write production code.

What You’ll Do

Own the Technical Architecture

Define and own cross-system technical decisions across the application layer, backend services, data pipelines, infrastructure, integrations, security, and core LLM orchestration layer.

Establish architectural principles that allow the company to move quickly today without creating unnecessary constraints as the platform, customer base, and engineering team grow.

Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, technical dependencies, and platform risks with a clear understanding of business priorities.

Build and Ship

Work directly in the codebase to develop new capabilities, improve existing systems, and resolve complex production issues.

Partner with the founding engineer and offshore engineering resources to scope projects, break down technical work, and maintain a high pace of execution.

Create the engineering practices needed to ship quickly and safely, including testing, code review, deployment, observability, incident response, and technical documentation.

Maintain a pragmatic approach to technical debt by distinguishing between intentional shortcuts and decisions that could compromise security, reliability, or future velocity.

Drive the AI Product

Lead the development of Arul’s LLM-centric platform, including agentic workflows, tool use, prompt systems, retrieval, memory, orchestration, and evaluation.

Design systems that produce reliable and explainable outputs in high-stakes healthcare contexts.

Develop safeguards for hallucinations, model failures, latency, privacy risks, and unpredictable agent behavior.

Create a disciplined experimentation framework for evaluating models, prompts, workflows, and product outcomes.

Stay current on the evolving AI ecosystem and determine where new models, frameworks, and techniques can create meaningful product leverage.

Secure the Platform

Build security, privacy, and compliance into the platform from the beginning.

Lead technical readiness for HIPAA, SOC 2, enterprise security reviews, and healthcare data-governance requirements.

Own decisions related to access controls, encryption, audit logging, data retention, vendor risk, infrastructure security, and incident response.

Partner with legal, compliance, and external advisors to translate regulatory requirements into practical engineering controls.

Lead Enterprise Integrations

Serve as Arul’s senior technical authority in conversations with health systems, pharmaceutical companies, and other strategic partners.

Lead the technical design and execution of complex integrations involving APIs, identity systems, healthcare data, security reviews, and partner infrastructure.

Translate ambiguous partner requirements into clear architectures, implementation plans, and delivery timelines.

Build trust with senior technical stakeholders by communicating trade-offs, risks, and solutions with clarity.

Build the Engineering Organization

Establish the engineering standards, rituals, and culture that will define Arul as the team grows.

Mentor engineers, provide thoughtful technical feedback, and help teammates improve their judgment and execution.

Create effective processes for planning, code review, documentation, technical decision-making, and cross-functional collaboration.

Shape technical hiring, interview design, leveling, onboarding, and performance expectations.

Help build an engineering organization that combines urgency, intellectual honesty, technical excellence, and deep commitment to patients.

Who You Are

You have approximately 3–12 years of software engineering experience, including meaningful experience operating at the Staff, Principal, Architect, or senior engineering leadership level.

You have designed and delivered complex production systems in a high-performing engineering environment.

You have strong full-stack technical depth across frontend applications, backend systems, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, security, and production operations.

You remain an active builder and are comfortable writing code, reviewing pull requests, debugging live systems, and working through implementation details.

You have experience building in healthcare, financial services, insurance, or another complex and highly regulated environment. Direct experience with HIPAA, SOC 2, healthcare integrations, or protected health information is strongly preferred.

You understand modern LLM applications beyond basic API usage. You have worked with agentic systems, model orchestration, retrieval, structured outputs, evaluations, guardrails, or similar AI product infrastructure.

You can set a long-term technical vision while making practical decisions under the constraints of an early-stage company.

You understand that excellent early-stage architecture is not about predicting every future requirement. It is about making clear, deliberate decisions that preserve speed while protecting the company from critical security, reliability, and scalability risks.

You communicate clearly with technical and nontechnical stakeholders and can translate among engineering, product, clinical, operational, and business perspectives.

You are comfortable with ambiguity, changing priorities, and incomplete information.

You take extreme ownership. When something important is blocked or broken, you step in and help solve it.

You are a natural mentor and force multiplier. The engineers around you become more capable because of the standards, context, and guidance you provide.

What Will Make You Stand Out

Experience building products used by patients, caregivers, clinicians, health systems, or pharmaceutical companies.

Experience integrating with EHRs, healthcare APIs, identity providers, clinical data systems, or enterprise healthcare infrastructure.

Experience taking a company through HIPAA, SOC 2, or a demanding enterprise security review.

Experience designing and operating LLM-based systems in production, particularly in high-stakes or regulated environments.

Experience helping scale an engineering organization from a small founding team into a larger, high-performing function.

A background at a leading technology company, respected healthcare technology company, high-growth startup, or premier academic institution.

Previous experience as a founder, founding engineer, or early technical hire.

Why This Role Is Special

This is a founding-team leadership opportunity at a company addressing one of the most painful problems in healthcare.

Build the foundation. You will shape the architecture, engineering culture, technical standards, and hiring philosophy from the ground up.

Real ownership. You will have the autonomy to make consequential technical decisions and the proximity to the founders to influence company strategy.

Meaningful traction. Arul has early revenue, backing from leading investors, and active partnerships with major healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations.

Leadership upside. You will join as Head of Engineering with the opportunity to expand your scope as the company, platform, and team grow.

A defining moment in technology. AI is changing what small teams can build. You will help determine how agentic systems can be deployed responsibly in one of the industries where reliability matters most.

A mission that matters. Your work will help patients and caregivers spend less time navigating healthcare logistics and more time focused on their health and their families.

This is an opportunity for a technical leader who wants a front-row seat to building a company, a category, and a product that can materially improve how people experience complex care.

Arul Health is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and welcome applicants from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe diverse teams make better decisions, build stronger products, and create more enduring companies.