Software Engineer

Pharos is a startup dedicated to improving patient safety in hospitals through advanced AI-powered reporting and analytics. Our mission is to make healthcare safer by automating hospital quality reporting and helping staff identify and prevent the root causes of avoidable harm. Our vision is an AI system reviewing every chart at scale, identifying patterns and giving clinicians the insights they need to prevent the 100k avoidable deaths that occur in U.S. hospitals every year. We raised a $5m seed funding round at the end of 2024.

This is a pivotal role as a founding member of the engineering team at Pharos. As a Software Engineer, you will bridge the critical gap between product vision and technical execution. You will be responsible for building, shipping, and maintaining our core user-facing applications, working in close partnership with the founders and design team. These products include an interface for users to review and correct AI-generated results to medical questions, as well as an analytics and root cause analysis platform where users can visualize clinical quality trends and drill down into the causes of specific patient safety events.

The scope of this role is intentionally broad. As one of our first engineers, you’ll be part of the founding team and work across product development, integrations, internal tooling, infrastructure, and full-stack engineering. We’re building a new category of product, so many of the problems you’ll work on won’t have an established playbook.

You’ll build customer-facing features, integrations with healthcare systems, internal tools that speed up clinical registry development and customer onboarding, and the LLM systems that power our product.

You’ll work closely with a high-agency, close-knit engineering team that moves quickly, shares context, and collaborates deeply on technical and product decisions. Your work will directly shape the systems healthcare workers use every day to make healthcare safer

• End-to-End Feature Development: Own the end-to-end development of new user-facing features, from technical design and implementation to testing, deployment, and monitoring.

• Integrations: Build and maintain integrations with customer systems, third-party platforms, APIs, and healthcare data sources.

• Internal Tools: Build internal tools that accelerate the development of our clinical registries, streamline data workflows, and make new customer integrations faster and easier to deliver.

• Design-to-Production: Work with designers and product stakeholders to turn product requirements and prototypes into reliable, maintainable software.

• Full-Stack Implementation: Build and maintain all components of our product, including the front-end and the back-end APIs and services that power them.

• Product Ownership: Act like a product owner. Rapidly prototype new ideas, participate in user feedback sessions, and use your product intuition to advocate for the best user experience.

• Infrastructure & Deployment: Manage and improve our CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and deployment processes to ensure reliability, scalability, and a fast development loop.

• Uphold Quality: Champion high standards for code quality, testing, and engineering best practices within a fast-moving startup environment.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work side-by-side with the founders, designers, and AI research team to solve complex problems and build a cohesive, mission-critical product.

Minimum requirements:

• Engineering Experience: 3+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a strong track record of building and shipping user-facing products.

• Web-Stack Proficiency: Deep expertise in modern web technologies, including a front-end framework (e.g., React, Vue), TypeScript, design systems and document databases.

• Production Experience: Experience deploying and maintaining applications in a cloud environment (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Product & Design Sense: Strong product intuition and a keen eye for design. You care deeply about the 'why' behind what you're building and the user's experience.

• Communication: Excellent ability to communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, including non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications:

• Startup Experience: Previous experience as an early-stage employee at a startup, demonstrating an ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment.

• 0-to-1 LLM Systems: Experience designing and building production LLM-powered systems from the ground up, including evaluation, orchestration, retrieval, and reliability.

• Healthcare Informatics: Familiarity with healthcare data, electronic health records (EHRs), or interoperability standards (FHIR, HL7) is a major plus.

As a software engineer at Pharos, you'll primarily work with our modern, high-performance stack:

• Frontend: React and TypeScript, built with Vite and styled with TailwindCSS.

• Backend & Services: TypeScript on Node for our application backends, and Python for our AI/ML services — LLM inference over clinical records, FHIR data processing, and clinical-logic evaluation.

• API layer: A schema-first RPC contract in Protobuf, generating both our services and our typed frontend clients.

• Database & Auth: Cloud Spanner as our primary transactional store, with Firestore and BigQuery alongside it.

• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform — especially Cloud Run, Pub/Sub - provisioned as infrastructure-as-code.

• Tooling: Monorepos on both sides, with Biome for TypeScript and Ruff for Python handling linting and formatting..

• Architecture: A small number of well-separated services on Cloud Run, talking over a schema-first RPC contract, with Pub/Sub handling ingestion and telemetry and Cloud Run jobs running our longer AI workloads.

• High agency: You’re excited by the opportunity to take ambiguous product challenges and drive them from idea to execution without waiting for direction.

• Motivated by impact: You’re energized to work hard as part of a high-performing team - holding a meaningful equity stake in a company with the real potential to save thousands of lives.

• Ownership mindset: You take pride in acting like an owner, taking full responsibility for the quality and outcomes of your work.

• Comfortable with ambiguity: You thrive in an early-stage startup environment where there’s no rigid hierarchy, everyone wears many hats, and you have real power to influence the path of the company.

• Foundational Impact: A rare chance to build a category-defining healthcare AI company from the ground up and directly improve patient outcomes at scale.

• Product + Technical Growth: Unique opportunity to develop expertise at the intersection of product, design, user-facing engineering, and cutting-edge AI.

• Ownership and Autonomy: Take ownership of the core user-facing product and have significant autonomy in your technical and product decisions.

• Significant Outcome Potential: Meaningful equity stake as a founding team member.

• Mission-Driven Work: Every day, work on technology that has the potential to prevent avoidable patient harm and save lives.

• Culture Creation: Actively shape a positive, collaborative, innovative, and mission-driven culture that values both technical excellence and user impact.

• Benefits: Great healthcare, dental and vision plans and 401k.

• San Francisco, USA.

• We expect our core team to be in the office most working days.