Founding Product Engineer (Python)

💷 Compensation: £75k-100k+ with generous equity

🤩 Benefits: Private health + dental by Bupa, all equipment covered

Asterix exists for one reason: to fix the biggest problem in healthcare: there are not enough doctors, and the system can no longer keep up. Millions of patients wait weeks for appointments. Millions more are stuck on hospital waitlists. Health conditions that can be prevented are missed and go unnoticed, and we at Asterix are building the only scalable solution. A new model of care where highly-qualified doctors are augmented by AI: safely, consistently, and measurably. The DoctorOS, our emerging clinical platform, is becoming the backbone of modern healthcare delivery. We combine rigorous clinical leadership, technology adapted for real-world care, and AI tooling that makes doctors 10x more productive. We are backed by Entrepreneur First, recently closed an oversubscribed funding round, and live with some of the largest healthcare providers in the UK, generating revenue and expanding fast.

Your mission will be to build safe, production-ready clinical AI. As a Founding Product Engineer, you will help define and build DoctorOS from the ground up. This is a backend-first, product-focused engineering role. You’ll obsess over system correctness, performance, reliability, and real-world clinical workflows. You’ll work primarily across backend services, data infrastructure, and platform systems, while collaborating closely with other engineers to ship features doctors use every day. AI is part of our platform but this role is about building robust, production-grade backend systems. If you’re excited about AI, great. If not, that’s fine too. There is no separation between product, engineering, and ownership here. You will shape what we build and how we build it.

Backend (core focus):

• Python (production backend services)
• AWS serverless: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and S3
• Event-driven and async systems
• Secure data handling and API design
• Supabase (Auth + Postgres where appropriate)

Frontend (collaborative, not primary):

• React 19 with TypeScript

Tooling:

• Playwright for testing
• Tailwind for styling

You will own:

• Backend systems for DoctorOS: APIs, services, data models, and infrastructure that power clinician-facing workflows.
• AI platform infrastructure: inference pipelines, retrieval systems, fine-tuning hooks, evaluations, safety mitigations, and monitoring.
• Clinical-grade safety infrastructure: hallucination detection, error monitoring, model governance, incident tooling, and system-level guardrails.
• Human-in-the-loop clinical validation: working directly with doctors and our clinical leads to define acceptance criteria and run prospective evaluations.
• Future team growth: help hire the next engineers and shape the technical culture from the ground up.

There is no partition between research, engineering, and product; here you are all three.

Who You Are

We don’t care about pedigree. We care about what you’ve built and how you think. You’ll be a great fit if you have:

• Strong backend experience with Python in production
• Experience designing and owning APIs and backend services
• Solid understanding of data modeling, async systems, and reliability
• Product instincts and good judgment around performance and safety
• Comfort collaborating across frontend, product, and clinical teams

Nice to have (not required):

• Experience working with AI-powered features or LLM APIs
• Familiarity with regulated or high-trust environments
• Startup or founding-team experience
• Some frontend experience (React/TypeScript)

Culture – The Asterix Way

• Humble: We assume we’re wrong until the data or a clinician proves otherwise. We default to curiosity. We ask questions. We help each other level up.
• High-intensity: Founder mentality - No corporate wannabes. You don’t wait for permission. You push problems to resolution. You act like an owner of the mission, the codebase, the infrastructure, and the culture. Solving one of society’s biggest problems won’t happen in a 9-to-5. We need our team to understand we will always ask for that little bit extra. We work hard, but with intention.
• Joyful energy: We take the work seriously but not ourselves. We laugh a lot. We celebrate the small wins. We show up with energy, optimism, and kindness, and back each other completely. If you bring enthusiasm and momentum, you’ll fit right in.
• In-person by design: We work together, shoulder-to-shoulder in London. This makes us faster, tighter, and better and it makes the journey more fun.

What Success Looks Like

• Ship production backend features used by clinicians
• Learn clinical workflows and real user needs deeply
• Take ownership of core services and APIs

Success looks like:

• Doctors using systems you built every day
• You shipping independently and raising the quality bar
• Own major backend systems end-to-end
• Make architectural decisions that shape DoctorOS
• Improve performance, reliability, and system observability
• Help interview and onboard new engineers

Success looks like:

• You’re the go-to person for critical backend systems
• You’re influencing product direction with founders and clinicians

Months 6-12: Own Systems, Shape the Company

You will:

• Own multi-quarter platform initiatives
• Mentor new hires and shape engineering culture
• Build foundational systems that scale with the company
• Represent Asterix in technical conversations with partners

Success looks like:

• Your work becomes core infrastructure
• You’re trusted with company-defining decisions
• You’re shipping systems that meaningfully reduce clinician workload and improve care outcomes

Result: Promotion to Senior / Lead Engineer + meaningful equity top-up.

Why Join Now

Because you want to do the most meaningful, high-leverage work of your career and do it early enough that your fingerprints are on everything. This role lets you:

• Redefine how high-quality healthcare is delivered to patients
• Build products that must be safe, measurable, and trusted
• Learn faster than anywhere else
• Have outsized impact and ownership
• Earn meaningful equity while shaping the team from day 0

If you want to build something that saves real clinicians real time and improves real patient outcomes… this is it!