Founding product engineer (healthcare)

About Clara

Clara is building the first AI-first medical practice from the ground up. We're reimagining primary care and providing patients with deep insights and immediate diagnosis and treatment in ways not previously possible.

Unlike most health AI startups, we deliver actual care — our clinical team writes prescriptions, orders labs, and manages patients. You'll build the product experience that patients and clinicians use every day, not a demo.

Clara's founders have built and scaled a previous telemedicine company to over $100M in revenue and we're funded by top investors.

What You'll Build

You'll own Clara's patient and clinician experience — the interfaces where AI-powered healthcare actually happens. This isn't typical health app work; you'll design and build UX for real-time AI conversations, medical record review, lab results, prescriptions, and care plans.

You'll work directly with our clinical team — physicians and nurse practitioners who use what you build to treat real patients every day.

Your Responsibilities

Patient-Facing Product (50%)

• Build intuitive interfaces for AI-powered medical conversations
• Design and implement flows for onboarding, health history, and record linking
• Create real-time streaming UI for AI responses
• Build accessible, mobile-first experiences for diverse patient populations
• Implement notifications and engagement features

Clinical Tools (30%)

• Build clinician dashboards for patient review and care management
• Design interfaces for prescription, lab order, and referral workflows
• Create efficient UX for clinical sign-off and supervision of AI
• Build tools for clinicians to review and annotate AI-generated insights

Product Craft (20%)

• Collaborate closely with design on healthcare UX patterns
• Ensure accessibility compliance (WCAG) for healthcare applications
• Optimize performance for real-time features
• Implement analytics and user behavior tracking

Tech Stack

• Frontend: React, TypeScript
• Styling: Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui
• Build: Vite
• Real-time: Streaming, WebSockets, SSE
• Payments: Stripe
• Backend API: Django DRF (consume)

What We're Looking For

Required

• 3+ years building production applications with React and TypeScript
• Strong product sense — you think about user problems, not just tickets
• Experience building patient-facing or consumer health applications
• Proficiency with modern frontend stack (Tailwind CSS, component libraries, Vite)
• Experience with real-time features (streaming, websockets)
• Care about accessibility and inclusive design
• AI-native (uses Claude/Cursor daily)

Ideal

• Healthcare UX experience — understanding of how patients and clinicians interact with software
• Built chat or conversational interfaces
• Experience with mobile-responsive healthcare applications
• Familiarity with healthcare compliance requirements (HIPAA) in product design
• Eye for design and attention to UI polish

What Clara Offers

Impact

• Ship code that affects real patient health outcomes
• Make architectural decisions for an AI-first medical practice
• Work directly with CTO on technical strategy

Team & Culture

• High-performance founding team at the forefront of healthcare AI
• Work alongside clinicians — our medical team delivers real care, so you'll see your product impact patient outcomes directly
• In-person collaboration in San Francisco (5 days/week)
• No bureaucracy, ship fast

Growth

• First engineering hires → opportunity to become engineering managers as team scales
• Ownership of entire domains
• Work with cutting-edge AI and healthcare technology

What Your Day to Day Will Look Like

In your first months, you'll be building the core patient experience — crafting a delightful onboarding flow that gets users set up in under 3 minutes, creating real-time chat interfaces that stream AI responses seamlessly, and integrating Stripe to power our subscription tiers. You'll collaborate directly with our clinical team to build dashboards where doctors review and approve prescriptions and lab orders. Every feature you ship will be mobile-responsive and accessible, because our patients come from diverse backgrounds and use all kinds of devices.

As Clara scales, your responsibilities will evolve. You'll have the opportunity to grow into engineering leadership, mentor new hires, shape our design system, and own increasingly complex product domains. The problems you solve today will look different from the challenges you tackle in a year — and that's exactly what makes this a founding role.

Interview Process

1. Intro call (30 min) — Meet founding team, learn about Clara's mission
2. Technical screen (60 min) — Domain-specific challenge
3. Onsite (4 hours) — System design, code pairing, team fit
4. Reference checks + offer