Senior Engineer

We're looking for a pragmatic builder to own and evolve the core Hesta platform as we iterate towards product-market fit.

About Hesta Health

Hesta is creating a new benchmark in women's health, delivering exceptional care at every life stage. As we advance towards this goal, we are committed to closing the women's health gap, beginning with pregnancy and postnatal as our initial focus. 75 million years of women's lives are lost every year due to poor health or early death. This gap limits potential, drives inequality, and reflects a healthcare system that wasn't built for women. We are changing that.

The Opportunity

We're building a modern care platform to support mothers and clinicians, and we're looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to own and evolve the core Hesta platform as we iterate towards product-market fit. You'll work closely with our founders, product, and clinical teams to ship features, strengthen foundations for scalable care pathways, and integrate AI capabilities that meaningfully improve clinical operations. This is a hands-on role for a pragmatic engineer who enjoys solving real problems and shipping quickly. You won't be alone technically: you'll work alongside a very experienced technical advisor with 15+ years of software and AI engineering experience, who sets the overall technical direction and mentors this role. We're looking for someone who can own the codebase, ship features, fix issues quickly, and help us move fast while maintaining reliability and trust.

What You'll Do

• Build, own and maintain the Hesta codebase
• Take day-to-day ownership of the platform across frontend, backend and infrastructure
• Translate clinical insights and user needs into high-quality, production-ready code
• Maintain and improve the reliability, quality and maintainability of the codebase
• Work directly with founders and clinicians to turn ideas into working product quickly
• Contribute to product decisions and pragmatic technical trade-offs
• Diagnose and fix bugs quickly
• Improve testing, monitoring, and observability
• Maintain data integrity, system stability, and security
• Work closely with technical leadership
• Collaborate with our senior technical advisor on architecture and technical direction
• Implement technical strategy while keeping solutions simple and pragmatic
• Build foundations for scale
• Improve infrastructure and deployment processes
• Design and maintain data-compliant systems with privacy, security, and regulatory standards embedded by default (e.g. UK GDPR, NHS DSPT, MHRA guidance)
• Implement observability and metrics to understand product performance, user behaviour, and system health
• Ensure our systems and features are audit-ready and aligned with healthcare regulatory requirements
• Contribute to documentation and lightweight quality processes that support regulatory readiness
• Champion clinical-grade reliability, data integrity, and patient trust in everything we build
• Support AI-enabled features
• Implement product features powered by LLMs or agent workflows
• Integrate APIs and automation where they meaningfully improve user experience or clinical operations
• Search and initiate new opportunities for automation and agentic behaviour

Who You Are

• Pragmatic builder: You focus on shipping useful product, not theoretical perfection. You're resourceful, solution-oriented, and comfortable figuring things out.
• Comfortable owning systems: You're happy taking responsibility for a codebase and keeping it healthy - from shipping features to debugging issues.
• Strong full-stack engineer: You likely have 5+ years' experience in high-impact, early-stage product teams, and are comfortable across the stack.
• Product-minded: You think in terms of user outcomes and trade-offs, not just technical solutions. You care deeply about the user and collaborate closely with design and product.
• Healthcare fluent: You understand (or are eager to learn) the constraints of clinical workflows, data privacy (e.g. UK GDPR, NHS standards), and safety.
• AI-curious: You're excited about the opportunities that AI brings, and want a chance to move up the curve quickly and impactfully. You have experience working with LLMs such as Claude or similar, including prompt design, evaluation, and workflow orchestration.
• Startup-ready: You're resourceful, thrive in ambiguity, and know how to move fast without breaking trust.
• Mission-aligned: You're excited about using technology to improve healthcare, particularly for women and families.

Specific Requirements

• Backend experience with Node.js and/or Python (FastAPI, Flask)
• Experience with front end frameworks (React, Next.js, Vue). Exposure to cross platform frameworks a plus (e.g. React Native).
• Experience deploying and operating systems on at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure), with containerisation (Docker; Kubernetes a bonus)
• You've built or worked on systems where data protection, access control, and auditability matter

What This Role Is (and Isn't)

This role is:

• A chance to own a real system from an early stage
• A collaborative role working closely with founders
• A chance to learn from experienced senior technical advisors, and join a community of healthtech practitioners working on the frontier of healthcare

This role is not:

• A pure architecture or management role
• A large engineering team environment (yet)

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. If there's anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

Company Benefits

• You're joining a winning team. (Founders have worked at: Airbnb, Babylon, NHS, Oxford, UCL)
• A unique opportunity to join a startup at the beginning and help build the backbone of a healthcare service designed specifically for women.
• Join a small, mission-driven team where your contributions have immediate impact.
• A close working relationship with, and mentorship from, our experienced co-founders and technical advisers
• Competitive salary and equity options - we're building this together
• Flexible, hybrid, working; our team work is based on the job that needs to be done, not office face time
• Office facilities: Spacious working space, with other innovators in Victoria, bike storage, changing facilities and a healthy supply of tea/coffee
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays