Founding Software Engineer

Founding Engineer

Applied AI to help patients access care

Elera is building the infrastructure for specialty care access. When a doctor refers a patient to specialist, our agents handle the complex communication, research, and follow up to actually get that patient into the right care. We return dozens of hours to doctor’s offices and give patients concierge-quality care at no cost.

We launched a few months ago and are already supporting access for 40,000+ patients, with volume growing around 30% week over week. For our technical staff, that means an incredibly dynamic environment to apply AI to real-world workflows, immediately deliver improved patient outcomes and iterate rapidly against user’s feedback.

The core technical challenge is turning complex multi-step workflows with multiple external participants into reliable software. Even a simple patient journey requires agent-enabled document extraction, agentic computer use and browser automations, AI enhanced search and enrichment, multi-stakeholder communications orchestrated over many weeks and doing it all robustly at scale.

60% of patients referred to specialty care (>50 million people a year) do not receive the care they are referred to. You probably have experienced it yourself and if not, you know people who have. Starting with our care coordination solution, we see a problem that is ripe for AI to solve for the benefit of millions of people.

About the role

We are looking for a Founding Engineer to help build the AI systems and product infrastructure that power Elera. You will work on the core problem of making AI reliable enough to own progressively more complex real-world work end to end.

You will work directly with the founders and our CTO, Will, who spent six years at Meta and was a Staff Engineer there. The team will stay small, so early engineers will have broad ownership over what we build, how we build it, and the engineering culture around it.

The role will be high ownership from day one. You will onboard to a critical domain and be charged with deciding what to build to solve the business problem. It will feel a lot like your own startup within a startup.

What you'll own

An example of a mandate we’ve handed to engineers in the past: “build the voice agents that will call specialists to collect clinic information, and schedule patient’s appointments”. That will mean:

• Building applied AI in production. We build agents that perform browser and computer use, voice agents who navigate specialist offices, agents doing multimodal document parsing, and long-running agents that orchestrate all these together to drive our core offering. For someone passionate about AI or excited to learn, there are unlimited opportunities.
• Defining and Measuring Success. You will decide what it means for this system to work, how we measure it, and decide what milestones we take on. Your job will be to move those metrics every week towards the goals you define.
• The product. You will have significant ownership over the customer-facing experiences as well as the underlying infrastructure. The best solution may be an agent, a workflow, a conventional product feature, or some combination of all three.
• The feedback loop. Ship into tens of thousands of real patient workflows, identify where the system succeeds or fails, and use that signal to make the product more capable every week.
• The team. Help define the engineering culture and hire the engineers who will build Elera with you.

Who you are

• You have designed and owned production systems end to end.
• You are product-minded and care about whether what you build actually works for the user.
• You are excited about applied AI and have strong intuition for where models are useful, where they are brittle, and how to build systems around those limitations.
• You use AI aggressively in your own work without being deferential to it. You ship fast, but you own the decisions, tradeoffs and outcomes of what you ship.
• You thrive in environments with high ownership, fast iteration, and ambiguous problems.
• You want to build, not just research. The appeal of the role is that your work will help thousands of people get care on day one.
• You have an opinion on what a great engineering team looks like and want to help build one from the beginning.

Healthcare experience is not required. What matters most is exceptional engineering judgment, strong product instincts, and excitement about pushing applied AI into production.

Why Elera

Elera has the three most exciting features for an engineer looking to work on AI. We have:

1. A problem with AI on its critical path instead of strapped on as an after-thought
2. Critical mass of customers who are eager for us to solve that problem, with thousands of patients and volume growing 30% WoW
3. Set of complex technical milestones that push the limits of the technology

On top of that, this is a unique opportunity to build a meaningful and massive business. When your doctor tells you that you need to see a specialist, you should not have to figure out everything that happens next yourself and you should never end up on a waiting list 6 months long. Care coordination is just the beginning of our ambitions as we think about how to solve access to specialty care for everyone.

If you want to build applied AI against real-world problems, with real usage and unusually broad ownership from the beginning, we'd love to meet you.

Logistics

• We are building the engineer team in SF and believe strongly in working together in person.
• $250k+ with 0.5-2% equity. We are happy to negotiate a salary/equity balance that suits you.

Our stack

Most of our web stack is TypeScript and we use Postgres for our database. No specific language or provider experience is required. Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to move quickly across the stack matter much more than familiarity with our current tools.