# Founding Engineer

> EQL Tech · Palo Alto, United States (Hybrid) · Full-time · Posted 2026-06-26

**Workplace:** hybrid

**Department:** Engineering, Product & Tech

## Description

### The Opportunity

EQL Tech is partnering with PhormAI to hire an exceptional Founding Engineer to join its team as the company builds Darwin, its Physical AI platform for Health & Wellness, into the technical backbone of a multi-vertical health intelligence business.

PhormAI is building Darwin to ingest multimodal sensor data — wearables, video, IMU, ECG — and generate clinical-grade insights through agentic AI. The platform is already live with paying customers across two distinct verticals: animal health (equine cardiac monitoring) and human health (tele-ICU intelligence deployed across multiple hospitals), with the architecture designed to extend into further verticals by swapping domain-specific ontologies rather than rebuilding the stack.

### The Role

You'll be PhormAI's Founding Engineer. Reporting directly to the founders, you'll own the technical foundation of the product — the data and model pipelines, cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and the application layer built on top.

-   **Data pipelines:** Build the pipelines that ingest, process, and transform data for the models.
-   **Cloud infrastructure:** Stand up and operate compute, storage, networking, and deployment from scratch.
-   **Orchestration:** Build the layer connecting ingestion, training, inference, evaluation, and serving.
-   **Operational foundations:** Establish CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and alerting from the ground up.
-   **Application layer:** Contribute to APIs, services, and user-facing surfaces on top of the platform.
-   **Technical strategy:** Make foundational architectural decisions in direct partnership with the founders.

## Requirements

Seniority isn't the bar here — what matters is a first-principles understanding of the stack and a track record of building end-to-end systems. You don't need a decade of experience.

-   **Python and SQL fundamentals** that are genuinely strong, not just familiar.
-   **Production data pipelines** — hands-on experience with Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar.
-   **Cloud proficiency** — AWS, GCP, or Azure, including provisioning, IAM, and networking.
-   **Containers & orchestration** — Docker and Kubernetes (or a managed equivalent).
-   **Infrastructure-as-code** — Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK.
-   **Backend API design** — REST, GraphQL, or gRPC, with working knowledge of auth.
-   **Relational database design** — Postgres or similar, including query optimization.
-   **AI developer tooling** — proficient with Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar.
-   **Cross-stack debugging** — a track record of operating across the stack and untangling complex systems.
-   **Engineering judgment** — sound instincts on trade-offs, not just technical breadth.

**Nice to have:** real-time streaming systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kinesis, Flink); open-source contributions; experience with health or clinical data; full-stack product experience shipping user-facing web applications.

## Benefits

-   **Founding equity** — meaningful ownership of the technical roadmap.
-   **Competitive base salary.**
-   **Small, high-trust team** — your work directly shapes the product.
-   **Build it right from day one** — no legacy debt to inherit.

## Apply

[Apply at EQL Tech](https://apply.workable.com/eqltech/j/A9F80F661C/apply)

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