Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering Gaia Health

Full-time, San Francisco

About the Role

Gaia is a consumer health company re-defining our experience with medicine across the whole stack. We have created technological breakthroughs in drug delivery technology that enable once monthly controlled-release of medicines rather than needing daily pills, and alongside this we’re building a tech platform for personalized medicine.

Gaia is hiring a founding Head of Engineering to build the technical backbone of the system that enables personalized medicine. You'll design and build our platform — the patient and physician experiences, the data infrastructure, and the integrations that connect our products to the broader healthcare ecosystem — and hire the team that grows it with you. We believe in building things the right way: patient trust comes first, compliance is architecture rather than paperwork, and the systems we ship deserve the same craft as the medicine they support.

What You'll Own

• The platform: backend, data infrastructure, and patient- and physician-facing web and app experiences, built hands-on

• Integrations with our pharmacy, clinical, diagnostic, and wearable partners — each one expanding what our platform can do for patients

• HIPAA-first compliance architecture and the company's standards for safe, effective AI –

• Hiring and leading the engineering team, setting the engineering culture from day one –

• Deep partnership with our product lead and design team — interface quality is an engineering concern here

• Championing AI-native ways of working across the company

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including leading engineers, and the hands-on range to architect and build across the stack today

• Production experience with sensitive or regulated data, and third-party integrations that held up in the real world

• A record of shipping fast in zero-to-one environments while making deliberate build-vs-buy and technical-debt decisions

• Product sensibility, genuine collaboration with design, and clear written communication

• Self-awareness, low ego, and the instinct to bring in experts early

• Preferred: Healthcare experience (FHIR, e-prescribing, telehealth, wearables) and shipped AI/LLM features are a plus — patient-trust instincts are a must