Product 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 Product 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 will be an integral part of the founding team, working at the intersection of product design, user experience, and full-stack engineering. We are creating a new category of product, requiring 0-to-1 innovation - turning a novel vision into a real, tangible application without existing examples to lean on. You'll be translating complex requirements and detailed designs into beautiful, functional, and reliable applications. You will have autonomy and ownership over the entire product lifecycle, from the first line of code to deploying in production and monitoring its impact. Your work will directly build the tools 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.

• Design-to-Production: Collaborate closely with designers to translate Figma prototypes into pixel-perfect, responsive, and intuitive web applications.

• 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.

Required:

• 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.

Strongly Preferred:

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

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

• Design Systems: Experience building or using design systems to maintain UI consistency and accelerate development.

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

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite, and TailwindCSS.

• Backend & Services: TypeScript on Bun (for application backends) and Python (for AI/ML services).

• Database & Auth: Firebase (Firestore, Auth, Hosting) integrated closely with GCP.

• Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), especially Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, and Google Healthcare API.

• Tooling: Nx for monorepo management, Biome (JS) and Ruff (Python) for linting/formatting.

• Architecture: We run a microservices architecture with event-driven patterns using Pub/Sub.

• 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: Good healthcare, dental and vision plans and 401k.

• San Francisco, USA.

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