Founding Software Engineer

About Gaia

Gaia’s vision is to fundamentally change our relationship with medicine.

We have created a personalized drug delivery platform that turns the daily chore of taking medication into a monthly ritual. For chronic medications where missed doses can have serious or potentially life-threatening health implications, Gaia makes taking medication perfectly, simple.

Our platform replaces the mental burden of adherence to give us more time, energy, and attention for what matters. We believe treatment should work not only in the body, but in the context of our lives.

We’re initially targeting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for perimenopause and menopause to launch our drug delivery platform. Every woman will experience menopause in her life, and more than 80% experience symptoms that damage their physiology, quality of life, and longevity. The treatment is hormone replacement therapy, and the current delivery modes are… subpar. The HRT market is rapidly growing following new FDA guidelines in 2026, and Gaia has partnered with leading OB-GYNs who have validated that our platform will become the preferred way for women to receive hormone treatment.

We’re assembling our founding team in San Francisco to reimagine how medicine fits into our lives. If you want to build at the intersection of breakthrough science and deep human empathy, come join us.

About the Role
Gaia is building a new way to experience medicine. We’ve developed drug delivery technology that can turn daily pills into once-monthly controlled-release medicines, and we’re building the software platform that makes those medicines personalized to the individual.

We’re hiring a founding Software Engineer to take that platform from 0 → 1 and into production. You’ll define the technical architecture and build across the patient and physician experiences, data infrastructure, and integrations that connect Gaia to pharmacies, diagnostics, wearables, and the broader healthcare ecosystem.

This is an unusually broad engineering problem. The software has to be elegant enough for consumers, useful enough for clinicians, flexible enough to support an expanding set of medicines and data sources, and robust enough for a highly regulated environment. You’ll have significant influence over how the system is designed from the beginning and the opportunity to see it through to launch at the end of 2027.

We care deeply about how this is built. Patient trust comes first. Compliance should be part of the architecture, not paperwork added later. And the software should be built with the same level of craft and care as the medicine it supports.

What You'll Own

• Building the platform hands-on across backend systems, data infrastructure, and patient- and physician-facing web and app experiences

• Integrating with pharmacy, clinical, diagnostic, and wearable partners, with each connection expanding what the platform can do for patients

• Designing HIPAA-first architecture and helping set Gaia’s standards for safe, effective use of AI

• Hiring the engineering team and shaping the engineering culture from day one

• Partnering deeply with product and design, with interface quality treated as an engineering concern too

• Championing AI-native ways of working across the company

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of engineering experience and strong evidence of taking complex products from architecture through implementation, 0 → 1 and into production

• Strong technical fundamentals and systems thinking across the stack, with the range to work across backend, web and app experiences, data, integrations, and product

• Experience building user-centered products in regulated environments, with a clear understanding of how regulatory requirements shape architecture and technical decisions

• A record of shipping fast while making thoughtful build-vs-buy, technical debt, and quality tradeoffs

• Excellent communication of thought and genuine collaboration across product, design, clinical, and other functions

• High initiative and autonomy. You create structure where little exists, move the work forward, and bring in the right expertise when you need it

• Self-awareness, low ego, a high quality bar, and a deep respect for patient trust

Additional experience we value

• Experience as a technical lead or leading engineers

• Healthcare experience, including FHIR, e-prescribing, telehealth, or wearables

• Experience shipping AI or LLM features

Building Gaia

Like our products, we are building Gaia by design.

The quality of the company should match the ambition of the science. At this stage, hiring is one of the most consequential forms of company design. Every person who joins Gaia will shape what we build, how we build it, and what it feels like to work here.

We look for people who care deeply about the quality of their work and the people they build alongside. People who move with urgency without lowering the bar, who are ambitious without losing their humanity, and who want their work to matter beyond the next milestone. We want to build a company that can last for hundreds of years and make life better for the generations that follow.

We’re assembling our founding team in San Francisco. The people who join now will help launch our first product in late 2027, prove an entirely new model of care, and define what Gaia becomes.

Compensation & Benefits

We want Gaia to be a place where people can do the best work of their lives, and we take seriously our responsibility to support the people doing it.

The salary range for this role is included in the posting. We take a thoughtful and consistent approach to compensation, using market data, the scope of the role, and internal benchmarks to make equitable offers. Once you join Gaia, we reward both what you accomplish and how you work, and we believe outsized impact should create outsized growth and opportunity.

Every offer also includes meaningful equity ownership so that the people building Gaia share in the value they help create.

Our current benefits include:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance with HSA and FSA options

• One Medical membership, 24/7 virtual care, and mental health support

• Unlimited paid time off, company holidays, and sick time

• $1,000 annual learning and development stipend to invest in your continued growth

• $300 twice-yearly stipend to take a day for yourself and do something that restores your time, energy, or attention

• Pre-tax commuter benefits for transit and parking

• Company-paid life insurance and short- and long-term disability coverage

• Pregnancy and family support benefits

• Pet care benefits covering routine care for up to five pets

Benefits are available to eligible employees and dependents. Coverage and program details vary by plan.