Director of Engineering

About Aware Health

Everyday, 50% or more of the workforce show up to work with pain, joint stiffness, muscle strain, or other physical impairments due to musculoskeletal (MSK) and orthopedic conditions. Too often, these conditions are misdiagnosed and treated passively with opioids, injections or costly surgeries. These expensive and risky treatment methods can often be avoided altogether with more modern approaches to preventing, diagnosing and treating MSK pain.

At Aware Health, our mission is to empower individuals to reach their goals through compassionate care, accurate diagnostics and precision treatment. We are a team of learners and collaborators driven by results and integrity. Our AI-powered platform ensures patients get the right care—avoiding inappropriate and frequently unnecessary tests, drugs, and surgeries.

We are growing rapidly and looking for ambitious candidates who are excited to embrace the challenges of a startup environment while improving the health of millions of people.

About the Job

We are looking for a highly-motivated and hands-on Director of Engineering with experience working in a fast-paced startup environment and a track record of building reliable, scalable systems that power AI-driven experiences. Flexibility, proactivity, and a healthy sense of urgency are vital to this role. You will work closely with our cross-functional teams to design, engineer, and deliver technology solutions.

You will need expertise in software engineering and system design, with proficiency in Golang (our main backend), and TypeScript. You have solid experience working with AI toolsets, LLMs, inference engineering, and building AI-powered solutions. Our tech stack includes Golang, TypesScript, Python, Postgres, BigQuery, LangChain, AWS, GCP, and AI/ML models.

Your ability to be hands-on is important — we are a small but mighty engineering team, and everyone is responsible for delivering code, with the assistance of AI coding tools. That being said, you will be responsible for managing the quality and maintainability of our code, and minimize AI slop.

Our culture is ambitious yet humble, and we care greatly about the impact we make. This is not a remote role—we are hiring only in the San Francisco Bay Area (or relocation) as we value in-person collaboration, requiring three days per week from our downtown San Francisco office. While we prioritize well-being, we are not a 9-to-5 culture, and at times critical deadlines may require extra effort. We balance high-impact work with time to recharge.

We are looking for smart, driven people. Please consider applying if you believe you are a strong candidate, even if you don't check off all our requirements below.

Direct applicants only — we are unable to respond to recruiters or agencies.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain software and technology systems across the full stack, with an emphasis on backend and core platform services
• Lead and mentor a small team of software engineers
• Manage development lifecycles, release cadence, and engineering productivity
• Collaborate closely with product, clinical, customer success, and sales to prioritize requests, translate into requirements, and deliver solutions
• Be hands-on (in a hybrid role) delivering code, technical design, and product features in addition to engineering leadership
• Build orchestration layers that connect data sources, services, models, and downstream product capabilities
• Build clean, well-structured graphql and RESTful APIs
• Assist with security compliance and technical safeguards
• Be an advocate and driver for agentic workflows and AI automation that amplify our humans and drive efficiency

Required Qualifications:

• Energized to work in ambiguous, fast-paced startup cultures, operates with a sense of urgency, and isn’t discouraged by being in an environment where we don’t have it all figured out yet
• Expertise with Golang, TypeScript, SQL and database schemas
• Experience managing cloud-based production environments and infrastructure
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs (Anthropic, OpenAI, HuggingFace, etc)
• Hands-on experience building with agentic frameworks (LangGraph/LangChain, Crew, etc)
• Solid understanding of event-driven architectures and distributed systems
• Genuine excitement about AI and its possibilities — with an open and curious mindset that drives experimentation, creativity, and trying new things
• 4+ years of experience working as a software engineer or similar role, with 2+ years leading/managing software engineering teams

Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience in Python including managing production Python environments/infrastructure
• Experience implementing safety guardrails, security, and/or compliance requirements
• Experience with crafting agentic memory solutions, building autonomous “always-on” agentic workflows, and post-training LLM models
• Experience with machine learning and deploying/training AI/ML models
• Some preference for candidates with a background in digital health

Benefits:

• Experience in Python including managing production Python environments/infrastructure
• Early equity stake in a fast-growing startup (pre Series A)
• Medical (PPO, HMO, HDHP), dental and vision
• FSA administration
• Life Insurance
• Short/long term disability
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Commuter benefits
• 401K
• On-site gym

How to Apply:

Direct applicants only — we are unable to respond to recruiters or agencies.

This is not a remote role, and requires 3 days a week in our San Francisco office.

Answer the following questions via our form (or as your cover letter if submitting from outside our system):

1. Tell me in 2-4 paragraphs about a relevant recent project you led, where you had an outsized impact on. Tell me about your team, but give details on your direct contributions, and not just what the team did as a whole.
2. Tell me in 2-4 paragraphs about a project you successfully delivered, but encountered challenges working with cross-functional teams. Tell me what those challenges were, and how you resolved them. Include lots of details, to help me gauge your ability to work with internal teams, lead through challenges and still deliver results.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer - We celebrate diversity and believe it is the key to creating vibrant, healthy communities. We encourage applicants from all cultures, races, colors, religions, sexes, national or regional origins, ages, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, military, protected veteran status or other status protected by law.