Founding Head of Engineering - Healf Zone in London

Healf is Europe's fastest-growing company, number one on the FT1000 and Sifted 100. From £1m to over £100m in under three years, we have a small, talent-dense team and an electric culture with day one founder intensity. We aim for £1bn in the next three years.

We curate the world's best wellbeing brands across The Four Pillars™: EAT, MOVE, MIND, SLEEP. The next chapter is harder and more interesting as we move from one market to many, from e-commerce to a technology platform, and from curating wellbeing to defining it. Healf redefines what wellbeing means for tens of millions of people.

Healf Zone is our next big bet to truly redefine what wellbeing means for the consumer. Despite all the information available, people remain confused and overwhelmed. The industry complicates matters with more information, data, and trends. What people need is a path to clear outputs, not another input. Healf Zone brings together all of a customer's data — bloods, wearables, tests, supplements, lifestyle — into clear, ongoing guidance.

As the founding engineer, you'll be the most senior engineer in Healf Zone and the technical lead across every pod — the intelligence engine, diagnostics and bloods, and the companion app. You'll set the architecture and the standard the whole team builds to, and be accountable for turning this vision into something that works. You'll partner closely with our product and science leads, work closely with the founder and CTO, stay deeply hands-on, and grow the team around you.

What You Will Do

• Build and own the core technology powering Healf Zone end to end, including lab-testing products, wearable integrations, the personalised protocol today, and the proactive wellbeing companion it grows into.
• Set the technical direction across systems such as sensor ingestion, sensor fusion, clinical knowledge graphs, product scoring, and protocol engines.
• Work across the stack, hands-on: building scalable Python backend services and high-quality frontend experiences using Next.js or an equivalent modern framework.
• Build the team — hire engineers, shape how the pod works, and raise the bar as Healf Zone scales.
• Lead across all pods: helping teams make strong architectural decisions and deliver cohesive end-to-end products across the Healf Zone organisation.
• Partner with product, clinical, data, and business stakeholders to identify new opportunities and translate ambitious ideas into scalable systems.
• Build from the ground up: making foundational architecture decisions and creating the infrastructure, services, and customer experiences needed to bring the Healf Zone vision to life.

What We Are Looking For

• A rare combination: an exceptional engineer with a real founder's instinct.
• Founder Mentality: You want to go all-in. You're looking for the thing you'll pour yourself into, your best work, not another job. You're energised by ambiguity and a blank page.
• You have extremely high-agency and want to move with speed.
• Proven 0-to-1 experience: you have built meaningful products or platforms from scratch rather than inheriting established systems.
• Technical Excellence: 7+ years of experience designing and building complex, data-driven products at production scale.
• Excellent Python backend engineering skills.
• Experience with Next.js or an equivalent modern frontend framework.
• A strong understanding of distributed systems, data pipelines, and scalable architecture.
• Technical leadership experience, including setting direction and guiding engineers across multiple teams or workstreams.
• Experience working with health, wearable, sensor, clinical, or recommendation data is highly valuable.

Nice to Have

• Experience building products in digital health, diagnostics, wellness, fitness technology, or another data-rich consumer environment.
• Familiarity with wearable, sensor, lab, biomarker, or other longitudinal health data.
• Experience designing systems such as sensor ingestion pipelines, data-fusion layers, knowledge graphs, scoring engines, or rules-based protocol systems.
• Exposure to clinical data models, health ontologies, or decision-support products.
• Familiarity with machine learning systems and how to integrate model outputs into production products.
• Experience working with privacy-sensitive or regulated data, including consent, security, governance, and data-quality considerations.

The Deal

Competitive and meaningful compensation package for the right person. We ask a great deal of the people who work here. We expect full ownership and a genuine commitment to give this chapter everything you have. In return, we will invest in your growth, your wellbeing, and the defining skills of the next decade.

We have built the fastest-growing company in Europe with a team small enough that every person in it shapes the outcome. The next person we hire will change the trajectory of the company.

If the most important work of your career is ahead of you, this is the place to do it.