Founding Principal Engineer

Handspring

$200K — $240K *
Healthcare
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years in production software development with senior-level experience.
  • Proven full-stack development capability from database to UI.
  • Strong leadership with a mentorship approach to engineering teams.
  • Prior experience managing or collaborating with distributed or offshore teams.
  • Background in regulated or data-sensitive environments, particularly healthcare.
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguous settings with limited resources.
  • Desire to build and collaborate in person, especially as a founding team member.

Responsibilities

  • Set the architectural direction for key systems including telehealth and AI.
  • Evaluate and determine build versus buy decisions strategically.
  • Actively contribute code to critical projects while leading engineering efforts.
  • Direct, mentor, and enhance the skills of offshore engineering teams.
  • Ensure reliability and security in compliance with HIPAA standards.
  • Establish the engineering team and culture as the organization scales.
  • Define and refine the technology stack to maximize efficiency.
  • Collaborate closely with the CEO to translate business needs into actionable technical plans.

Benefits

  • Meaningful early-stage equity opportunity.
  • Flexible remote and in-person work arrangement (3 days/week in NYC).
  • Opportunity to shape the engineering culture from the ground up.
  • Direct influence on strategic architectural decisions and technology adoption.
Full Job Description
About the role

We're hiring our first senior engineer onshore: a Founding Principal Engineer who will sit beside the CEO and lead engineering.

Until now, our engineering team has been offshore. We ship fast, but we've reached the point where we need a senior technical leader in the building to help accelerate our roadmap, make architectural calls as we scale, and lead the adoption of AI across the organization.

Handspring values doers who can lead. You'll write production code on our most important systems, and you'll lead: setting engineering standards, reviewing and mentoring, directing the offshore team, and shaping how engineering operates as we scale past Series B.

We move fast, operate with deep empathy, and value clarity, experimentation, and humility. If you want to be the senior engineer who builds the foundation rather than inherits it, we'd love to meet you.

Key responsibilities
  • Set the technical direction. Own architecture across telehealth, EHR, therapist onboarding, patient dashboard, and AI usage.
  • Help make the build/buy decisions. We do not build for the sake of building, and are thoughtful about what to outsource vs build.
  • Write the code that matters. Stay hands-on as a top individual contributor on the hardest, highest-stakes problems.
  • Lead the team. Direct and level up the offshore engineers, establish how we work (code review, testing, on-call, incident response), and bring rigor without bureaucracy.
  • Own reliability and security. Be accountable for the uptime and correctness of clinical systems, and for engineering practices that hold up to HIPAA and payor scrutiny.
  • Build the eng org. As we grow, hire onshore engineers, define how the team is structured, and set the culture and standards a larger team will inherit.
  • Define the stack. Currently use TypeScript across the stack, Node and React, deployed on AWS. You will help define the stack as we scale. We adopt new tech for leverage, not novelty
  • Partner closely. Work directly with the CEO and translate clinical, growth, and operations needs into technical plans the team can execute.


Who you are
  • You are energized about solving logistically complex problems
  • 8+ years building production software, including time at the staff/principal level. You've been the most senior engineer in the room and owned systems end to end.
  • Deep full-stack strength. You're comfortable owning everything from schema to UI.
  • You've led while staying hands-on: set standards, mentored strong engineers, directed teams, and raised quality without stepping away from the code.
  • Experience working with distributed or offshore teams, or strong instincts for how to make that work.
  • You've built in regulated, high-reliability, or data-sensitive environments (healthcare experience is a plus) and take security and correctness seriously.
  • You're comfortable with ambiguity and limited resources, biased to ship, and energized by being the one who figures it out.
  • You want to build in person


Success in this role means
  • Increase in engineering velocity
  • Acceleration of AI adoption across the organization
  • Architecture decisions are made deliberately and hold up as we scale
  • We can hire and onboard onshore engineers into a team with real standards and culture


Position details
  • Full-time
  • 3 days/week in-person in NYC
  • The salary range is $200K - 240K, plus meaningful early-stage equity
  • You must be based in the United States and have U.S. work authorization

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