Founding Senior Product Engineer / CTO

TL;DR

• Ahead Health is building an AI-powered preventative health platform for Europe
• You’re a product-obsessed engineering leader who likes 70%+ coding in Y1, 30% in Y2+
• Joining a team of experienced founders & builders out of Google, Coolblue, and Oxford
• Initial cash reflects our early stage, the equity is optimized to make you a true owner

We are Ahead Health

Healthcare is broken. It's reactive, fragmented, and increasingly expensive. While we have more health data than ever before, we're not using it effectively to prevent disease and optimize wellbeing.

That's why we started Ahead Health. We're building an AI-powered platform that transforms how people understand and manage their health, shifting from reactive treatment to proactive prevention. By combining cutting-edge technology with medical expertise, we help people take control of their health journey before problems arise.

The product vision: personal concierge medical care, for everyone. Three key components: (1) A data vault with the most up-to-date picture of your health, (2) a trusted single-point-of-care, and (3) the most extensive, helpful dashboard.

We're excited to build Europe's leading preventative health platform, starting in Switzerland🇨🇭. You’ll join:

• Nick - scaled an ecommerce unicorn as first employee and CTO, later led Google Flights
• Sven - PhD at Oxford, built medical devices before, including a portable MRI
• Prof. Dr. Olivio - professor at University of Zurich, prostate and AI-focused radiologist
• Prof. Dr. Michael - professor at University of Zurich, specialized in MSK

We’re backed by founders and execs from Hugging Face, Cradle, Google, DeepMind, Oviva, Stanford Medicine, GE, Philips, and Coda.

Your role

As our Founding Engineering Lead, you'll architect and build our technical foundation from (almost) the ground up. You're not just a technical leader – you're a builder at heart who's excited to write code and create something meaningful. In the first year, expect to spend 70%+ of your time coding, gradually transitioning to a more strategic role as we scale.

You'll be joining at the perfect moment to shape not just our technical direction, but the company itself. We have our first basic MVP in place, and have had our first paid users go through it. Now that we raised some money, it’s time to build a high-quality, privacy-first consumer experience that can deliver a 70+ NPS every time.

Your first priority will be establishing our technical infrastructure and building our core product. This includes architecting our cloud infrastructure, implementing our data pipeline and AI systems, and ensuring we maintain the highest standards of security and privacy. You'll make crucial decisions about our tech stack and set the engineering culture that will attract exceptional talent as we grow.

We believe this is an ideal role for an entrepreneurial engineering leader who wants to build something impactful from scratch, alongside an experienced team.

Responsibilities

• Technology strategy: define and implement our technical roadmap, making key architectural decisions that will scale with us
• Hands-on coding: lead by example, writing high-quality code and building core features of our platform
• AI/ML integration: helped by advisors, design and implement our AI architecture, focusing on practical applications of LLMs and computer vision for medical images.
• Security & compliance: establish robust security practices and ensure compliance with healthcare regulations from day one
• Team: help recruit and develop a world-class engineering team as we scale
• Product development: Work closely with product and healthcare teams to translate complex requirements into elegant solutions
• Technical operations: build and maintain our cloud infrastructure, ensuring reliability and performance

Need to have

• 12+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years of people management experience
• Strong trajectory at a high-growth technology start-up or top-tier technology company
• Hands-on experience in back-end, cloud, and security
• Experience setting technical strategy and crafting architecture for 0-to-1 products
• GenAI and LLM-curious; we’re not building a foundation model, but you love the application-layer
• Mission-driven, and with the grit for the ups and downs of an early-stage adventure
• Product-obsessed, with an appreciation of consumer-grade UX (“good taste”)
• You deeply believe in technical excellence, but put pragmatic delivery first
• Something unique in your career that demonstrates exceptional capability

Nice to have

• Experience in healthtech or other regulated industries
• Prior startup experience, ideally in an early-stage environment
• Direct experience implementing LLM-based solutions
• Track record of building and leading engineering teams
• Based in Zürich or Munich (but remote in Europe is totally OK)

What we offer

• One of the first hires with a significant equity upside opportunity
• Build a high-quality product in a fast-paced culture that doesn’t take itself too seriously
• No bureaucracy, no egos, no overcomplicated launch processes: ship fast, learn fast
• Real impact on real humans by improving the accessibility and outcomes of healthcare
• Autonomy to shape our technical direction and company culture
• Work with experienced founders and advisors
• Remote-friendly environment with flexibility in how you work
• Regular team gatherings in the Swiss mountains
• In the first ±2 years, less cash than you’re worth, but definitely enough equity to compensate for it