Remote Head of Engineering & Product/ Founding Team in Derby

MindFriend is a mental-health marketplace connecting people with verified, licensed clinicians for online therapy: search, booking, payments, and live video, audio and chat sessions in one place. The platform is built and largely working, with a capable lead developer and a team. We're now bringing in the senior leader who will set the engineering bar, decide when we're ready to launch, and grow both the platform and the team from there with a level of ownership only the earliest team members ever get.

This role carries more weight than most engineering jobs. We handle sensitive health data and host live therapy sessions, so reliability and security aren't features; they are the trust the entire category depends on. The person who gets this right will have real authority to do it properly and will help shape what MindFriend becomes.

A word of honesty: This is a founding-team role at an early-stage company, which means it is hands-on. You will get into the code. You will run the QA passes yourself. You will test a video session on a bad connection at 9pm because a launch depends on it. You will make calls with incomplete information and live with them. You'll lead a small team and a freelance bench but you'll lead by doing, not just directing. If you want a purely strategic seat with people beneath you to execute, this is the wrong role. If you want to own the hardest, most consequential technical problems in the company and see them through, read on.

Requirements

• What you'll be responsible for:
• The launch decision setting the readiness bar, and holding launch until it's met.
• Reliability of live video, audio and chat sessions on a user's old laptop and a clinician's poor wifi, not just a developer's machine.
• Security and privacy of sensitive health data the controls that keep us defensible, and an independent security review before we go live.
• End-to-end quality of the booking-and-payments flow, including the failure paths most teams skip.
• The product direction after launch what we build next, in what order, and why.
• Leading and growing the engineering and product team.

What success looks like:

• In your first weeks — to launch:
• Own and close out the launch readiness bar; get MindFriend live in its first market with confidence, not crossed fingers.
• Pass an independent security review with critical findings remediated before go-live.
• Prove the full booking-to-session flow end-to-end, including every failure path, across real devices and networks.
• In your first 6–12 months:
• Turn a freelance-built platform into a maintainable, well-owned codebase with a team to match.
• Establish a sane delivery cadence and the engineering and product processes we'll scale on.
• Set the post-launch roadmap and start shipping against it.

Who you are:

• 8+ years building software, with senior or lead engineering experience and you've carried real product responsibility, not just executed someone else's spec.
• You've shipped a consumer product that takes real payments and handles sensitive personal data, to production and through real users.
• You've worked somewhere the security and data bar is real health-tech, fintech, or similar. You're not learning why it matters here.
• You can run a security review and stand up the controls behind it yourself, not just brief someone else to.
• Hands-on operator first, leader second: you lead through doing.
• You work directly and candidly with a non-technical founder.

A bonus, not a requirement: you've been part of an early-stage or founding team before and know how to operate without much process; marketplace or telehealth experience; multi-jurisdiction products; or having taken a product through SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR.

Why this role matters: In a category built on trust, the technical decisions are the business. Whether a session holds, whether data stays safe, whether the platform feels solid that's what earns the trust everything else depends on. As a founding-team member you'll build the foundation MindFriend grows on, and shape the company from its first day live. This is a rare chance to own the technical heart of a company at the moment it matters most.

Benefits:

• A founding-team seat working directly to the founder, with real authority and real ownership of the problems that matter most.
• A product that's already built and a launch to drive, not a blank page.
• Competitive cash compensation plus equity, reflecting the seniority and ownership of the role.
• And a mission worth the work making trustworthy mental-health support easier to find.

How to apply: Write to us one short story: a product you took to launch that handled payments or sensitive data what you were responsible for, and what nearly went wrong. We value substance over polish; tell us what you've built, not just where you've worked.