Founding Engineer

FOUNDING ENGINEERKulea • Remote, West Coast US • Full-time THE OPPORTUNITY In elder care, some of the most important knowledge about a person never makes it into the chart. It lives in the small observations caregivers make every day: what calms someone before bed, what triggers agitation, how they prefer to be approached, what changed since yesterday, what worked last time. Too often, that knowledge disappears at the end of a shift. Kulea is building the software layer that captures, organizes, and carries that knowledge forward. We are an early-stage SaaS company building tools for elder care facilities and home care agencies so caregivers, administrators, and clinical leaders can share what they know, coordinate care, and act on the collective intelligence of their teams. We are looking for our founding engineer to help build the product and the technical foundation of the company. WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS You will be the first engineering hire. That means you will help define the architecture, stack, engineering practices, AI development workflow, data model, security posture, and product-quality bar from the beginning. This is not a maintenance role. It is not a narrow feature role. It is a chance to build the foundation of a vertical SaaS company in a large, underserved market where the product can materially improve the daily experience of caregivers and the people they care for. You will work directly with the founders, move quickly, make consequential technical decisions, and help shape the engineering culture that future hires inherit. WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH Kulea's founding team combines company-building experience, vertical SaaS operating experience, and deep exposure to elder care workflows. One cofounder is a multi-exit software founder with a track record of building and scaling vertical healthcare SaaS companies, including a current portfolio company with over 100 employees. This is not a first-time-founder experiment; the playbook for taking a focused vertical healthcare SaaS product from zero to market leadership has been run before. The other cofounder brings experience across finance, investment banking, private equity, high-growth vertical SaaS, chief-of-staff operations, sales, and partnerships. He is focused on customer discovery, GTM, partnerships, operations, and the commercial foundation of the business. You will also work closely with clinical and operational subject-matter experts who have spent their careers inside elder care and home care. They will help ground product decisions in real caregiver workflows rather than abstract product ideas. Decisions will be fast. Your fingerprints will be on nearly everything. WHAT YOU'LL BUILD Kulea is building an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant platform with two primary surfaces: • Mobile apps for caregivers in facilities and in the field• Web dashboards for administrators, clinical leaders, and operators Underneath those surfaces is a data layer designed from day one to support analytics, workflow automation, LLM-powered summarization, structured extraction, retrieval, and agentic features. AI is meant to be part of the structure of the product: how information is captured, cleaned, summarized, surfaced, and acted on across shifts, clients, facilities, and care teams. The work includes mobile UX, web UX, backend architecture, multi-tenant data modeling, permissions, auditability, integrations, AI infrastructure, and the practical reliability work required to make model-driven features useful in production. WHAT YOU'LL DO • Own the first version of Kulea's technical architecture across mobile, web, backend, data, and AI infrastructure• Build a secure, reliable, multi-tenant platform suitable for enterprise B2B customers• Make foundational stack decisions and document the tradeoffs behind them• Design data models that support both day-to-day workflows and downstream analytics• Build AI-native product features, including retrieval, structured extraction, summarization, workflow assistance, and LLM-driven analysis over caregiver-generated data• Establish practical evaluation, testing, monitoring, and review processes for model-driven features• Use AI-first development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent systems to move faster without lowering the quality bar• Partner closely with founders and elder care SMEs to turn real-world workflows into software that is simple, fast, and useful• Build engineering practices for code review, testing, deployment, observability, security, and on-call• Help hire, evaluate, and lead future engineering team members as the company grows WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE In the first few months, you will help turn product vision and early customer discovery into a working, reliable MVP. Over time, success looks like: • A product that caregivers can actually use during real shifts• A technical foundation that can support enterprise customers without needing to be rebuilt• A data model that captures the nuance of care