Associate Member of Technical Staff

Tecla; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 100,000 - 115,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Opportunity to work on meaningful problems

Job summary

Tecla, located in Austin, Texas, is seeking a dedicated Associate Member of Technical Staff to work on impactful AI systems. The ideal candidate will have up to 6 years of experience in software engineering, with a strong emphasis on clean coding practices. Responsibilities will include developing AI-driven tools and integrating with healthcare APIs. This full-time role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to meaningful projects that help seniors while working in a dynamic, small team environment.

Qualifications

• 0-6 years of experience as a software engineer or related role.
• Ability to write clean, reliable code.
• Comfortable working across backend, frontend, and ML.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve the core AI companion experience.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for model quality and safety.
• Integrate with external APIs in healthcare.

Skills

Software engineering fundamentals

Machine learning understanding

Full-stack development

AI tools proficiency

Problem-solving

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Job description

Please upload your CV Resume in English.

Yearly salary: $100,000 - $115,000 USD + equity

Associate Members of Technical Staff are generalist engineers who work across the entire stack. You won't be slotted into a single team or feature area, you'll go where the highest-impact work is. One week that might be shipping a new voice interaction flow, the next it might be building infrastructure to scale partner deployments, the next it might be fine-tuning a model or building an eval pipeline.

We're a small team, which means you'll have an outsized impact from day one. You'll ship code that real users interact with within your first week. You'll be in the room for architectural decisions. You'll have direct access to the people using your product, seniors and the families who care about them.

This is not a role where you'll be writing tickets for other people to execute or sitting in sprint ceremonies. You'll own problems end-to-end: understand the need, design the solution, build it, ship it, and learn from how it performs.

How We Build

We don't just build AI, we build with AI. Every engineer ships with AI tools as their daily driver. Our codebase, our infrastructure, our internal tools, all of it is built AI-first. We expect you to use AI aggressively in your workflow: writing code, reviewing code, debugging, designing systems. If you're still doing everything by hand, this isn't the right fit. We're looking for engineers who treat AI as a force multiplier and are constantly pushing the boundary of what's possible when humans and AI build together.

What You Might Work On

• Building and improving the core AI companion experience, voice, conversation, memory, personalization
• Designing and implementing systems for partner onboarding, deployment, and monitoring at scale
• Developing evaluation frameworks to measure and improve model quality and safety
• Building internal tools and infrastructure that make the team more productive
• Integrating with external APIs and services across healthcare and senior living ecosystems
• Working on ML pipelines, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, RAG, or inference optimization
• Shipping full-stack features from database to UI
• Solving problems we haven't anticipated yet, at our stage, the most important work often doesn't have a name

Who You Are

• 0-6 years of experience as a software engineer, ML engineer, or in a related technical role, we care about what you can build, not how many years you've been doing it
• Strong fundamentals in software engineering: you write clean, reliable code and you understand systems
• You learn fast and context-switch well, generalists thrive here
• You have strong opinions, loosely held, you'll push back on bad ideas (including your own) but you don't let perfect be the enemy of shipped
• You're comfortable working across the stack: backend, frontend, infrastructure, ML, you don't need to be an expert in all of them, but you're not afraid of any of them
• You default to shipping: when in doubt, you build something, put it in front of users, and iterate
• You genuinely care about seniors, not as a market segment, but as people
• Based in Austin or willing to relocate

Nice to Have

• Experience building LLM-powered applications (RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evals)
• Experience with voice/audio AI systems
• Experience working in healthcare, healthtech, or regulated environments (HIPAA, SOC 2)
• Contributions to open-source projects, independent research, or technical writing, if you've built something interesting outside of work, put it at the top of your resume
• Experience at an early-stage startup where you wore multiple hats

Our Stack

• Python, TypeScript, modern cloud infrastructure, and a lot of LLM tooling. If you don't know parts of our stack, that's fine, we hire for ability to learn, not checkbox familiarity.

What You Get

• Ground-floor engineering role at a well-funded AI company with a massive market opportunity
• Work on hard, meaningful problems at the intersection of AI and healthcare
• Small team, high ownership, your code ships to real users, fast
• Direct exposure to the full business: product, partnerships, go-to-market, not just your IDE
• The chance to build something that actually helps people

*Please note our partner is only looking for full-time dedicated team members who are eager to fully integrate within their team.