Product Engineer

Mission: A world where anyone who wants a family can try.

We're transforming fertility care from the ground up to make it more accessible. At Gaia, we believe that when it comes to starting a family, financial barriers shouldn't determine who gets to try. We're building the technology infrastructure that makes fertility treatments available to everyone, not just the fortunate few who can afford a $50k bill upfront.

Fertility affects 1 in 6 people, yet only 2% of babies are born via IVF. We're changing that by making fertility care 10x better, with 2x better outcomes, at half the cost.

Our founder experienced this firsthand - going through IVF and having a child because he could afford a $70k bill. Most people can't. We're here to change that reality.

You will not be just building software - you will be architecting the infrastructure that makes family building accessible to everyone. This is where fintech meets healthcare in the most meaningful way possible.

🎯 The Gaia Orchestrator: Our internal framework that automates care navigation, financing, clinic operations, and risk tracking across a complex ecosystem of patients, clinics, lenders, and insurers. You'll own real slices of this - state machines, workflows, and integrations with external systems that weren't designed to talk to each other.

🧠 AI-Native Operations Layer: We use AI not as a feature but as infrastructure. Our ops, compliance, and member workflows run on LLM-powered agents and scheduled routines. You'll build and extend these - not just consume them.

⚡ Real-time Underwriting Engine: Predictive modeling in a risk layer no one else has touched, adapting to patient and clinical data to make fertility care financially accessible. You'll work on the models and the pipelines that feed them.

💙 Member-Facing Experiences: Crafting the moments that matter most - from pre-cycle intake to outcome reporting. People come to Gaia at one of the most vulnerable points in their lives. The experiences you build will shape how that feels.

We're building in a space that's:

🔒 Highly regulated: Healthcare and finance bring an interesting combination of complex regulatory and safety concerns. HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, and PHI are first-class constraints, not afterthoughts. If you've built in regulated environments, you'll hit the ground running.

❤️ Emotionally charged: The people using what you build are going through a complex and emotionally charged journey of building a family. Every interaction, every piece of data, every experience you ship exists in that context. That weight is real, and it makes the craft matter more.

💰 Financially complex: We sit at the intersection of lending, insurance, and outcome-based pricing in a domain where the numbers are high and the stakes are personal. The models are non-trivial and the edge cases are endless. You'll need to think beyond the happy path.

🔄 Technically fragmented: the healthcare industry is fragmented with complex technologies and protocols. These systems were not meant to talk to each other. You'll build integrations that are robust enough to handle the messiness of the real world, and resilient enough not to break when it does.

Your solutions will directly impact people's ability to start families. Everything you build will touch lives directly.

🚀 Unreasonable - You believe impossible problems deserve creative solutions

🦁 Brave - You're comfortable building in ambiguity and changing the status quo

🔍 Accountable - You take ownership of problems that span across complex domains and technology

🔄 Adaptable - You can pivot quickly in a fast-moving environment

💗 Kind - You care deeply about the people depending on what you build

Experience: 5+ years as a full-stack engineer in startup environments

Technical Skills:

• Strong Python and TypeScript. We use the Frappe framework to build our backend. Experience with Frappe is a plus but not required, it's learnable

• Experience with MariaDB or any other RDBMS

• Strong technical background in building high-quality code and infrastructure

• Preference for simple solutions over complex ones

AI Nativeness (non-negotiable):

We are an AI-native team and we're looking for engineers who are actively optimizing how they work with AI. Not curious about it. Not learning it on the side. Already doing it. You use Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent as a core part of how you build. You've integrated LLM APIs into something real. You've automated something in your own workflow that used to take you time. If AI has materially changed how you work in the last 12 months, we want to talk.

If you are still scratching the surface, this role is not for you.

Mindset:

• Put the user first

• Excited to work in small, cross-functional teams

• Comfortable taking on big, loosely defined projects and breaking them down

• Able to balance tactical execution with strategic thinking

• Holistic problem-solving approach beyond just technical considerations

We always prefer passion over perfect skill matches. If you're excited about our mission and values, we want to hear from you.

Market Timing: The fertility care market is exploding ($20bn US market, growing 10% annually), and we're shaping how it gets accessed and paid for.

Early Impact: Your work won't disappear into layers of abstraction. Every smart solution changes our trajectory.

📈 Scale of Opportunity:

• 3,500 Gaia members = $100M Gross Revenue business

• 30,000 Gaia members = $1bn Gross Revenue business

• The true market demand could be 5x higher

We are backed by the best VCs including Atomico and Valar Ventures.

• We work in small cross-functional teams collaborating closely across the business.

• We believe work should be shipped and improved in small iterations with the help of early feedback from users.

• We are heavily biased towards keeping things simple, using existing open-source technologies and not reinventing the wheel if it doesn't add any value.

• AI is how we operate. We use Claude, pi, Codex, and Cursor to write code, triage bugs, manage production incidents, automate compliance workflows, and run operations. Every engineer at any time has multiple agents doing their work so they can focus on solving real problems. AI isn't a tool we reach for occasionally - it's the default. Our engineers are expected to bring that same instinct to everything they build and everything they do.

• Our tech stack is built of strongly typed Python, TypeScript, Next.js, React.js, MariaDB and Redis. Our data platform is built using DBT, Prefect, Fivetran and Snowflake.

• Our production services run on AWS and Vercel. We automate infrastructure and configuration using Pulumi and GitHub Actions.

• Our observability stack is built up of Datadog and Sentry.

• Competitive base salary + meaningful equity - range for this role is $110k - 150k

• Hybrid NYC work environment (we’re in our office at 387 Park Ave 3 days a week!)

• Full benefits (very generous for early-stage startups)

• Fertility & egg-freezing benefits

Culture: Hybrid/Remote working - 3 days in office (Mon, Wed and Thu) at our Flatiron office location

"Thank you so much! Couldn't have done this without you. I know people may say this all the time but you have changed our lives. I could never repay you." - Victoria Webster

We're looking for engineers who want to solve complex problems that directly change people's lives. If you're ready to build something that matters, let's talk.