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 on
- Build production agents that operate legacy healthcare systems with the consistency of a trained operator
- Make the hard calls on failure recovery, correctness guarantees, and scale
- Direct, review, and test AI-assisted code so velocity never costs quality
- Take a customer problem from root cause to shipped fix, end to end
- Own 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 cliff
- Cash salary: none during the founding period. Market-rate salary begins at our next priced round, with the founding engineer first in line
- Benefits: none at this stage; health coverage and standard benefits begin with cash compensation
- Full transparency on cap table and terms in the first conversation
You are a fit if
- You have shipped systems that real revenue depended on
- You are highly productive steering AI-assisted code and know when not to trust it
- You have set direction for other engineers and still write the hard code yourself
- You reason from first principles and can defend a tradeoff in a design doc people read
- You have built distributed systems that held up under real load
- You have automated real business workflows end to end
- You work well async across time zones
- You 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 production
- Strong TypeScript and Node.js
- Production experience building with LLMs, including evaluation and knowing when not to use a model
- Browser automation and browser APIs, such as Playwright, Chromium, or extension APIs
- Azure 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 engineering
- You want someone else to set technical direction
- You 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 resume
- A cover letter, one page at most, on why you believe you are the best person for this role and what you would build first
- One 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.