Engineering leadership for a healthcare platform changing how recovery works
Pre-Funding — Equity OpportunityOrbiit Recovery is a HIPAA-compliant SaaS platform for substance use disorder treatment. We deliver recovery support via SMS — no app downloads, no devices, just text messages that meet patients where they are. Treatment centers get real-time engagement dashboards. Patients get daily micro-courses, check-ins, and crisis support.
The platform is production-ready and architecturally mature — 48 architecture decision records, comprehensive HIPAA policies, and a fully deployed infrastructure on Azure. What we need now is an engineering leader to help scale it. See the full technical overview →
This is a ground-floor opportunity. We're pre-funding, building toward a $3M raise. The Director of Software Development will be the first engineering hire — shaping the team, the culture, and the technical direction from day one.
You report to the CTO (Bert Carroll). The CTO stays hands-on with product vision, architecture, and AI strategy. You own engineering execution — shipping features, building the team, and running the technical operation.
| Area | What You Own |
|---|---|
| Engineering execution | Ship features. Own the backlog. Unblock yourself and the team. |
| Team building | Hire 4-5 engineers and specialists over 12 months. Build the culture. |
| Technical leadership | Code reviews, architectural decisions (with CTO), engineering standards |
| DevOps & infrastructure | CI/CD, monitoring, disaster recovery, scaling. Azure App Service + PostgreSQL. |
| Quality & testing | Test coverage, deployment confidence, CI enforcement |
| Documentation | Maintain our ADR/session/runbook culture as the team grows |
| Partner integrations | Clinical data partners, payment processors, monitoring APIs |
This is an AI-first company. This platform could not have been built without AI — not by one person, and not in this timeframe. The traditional path would have required 4-5 engineers, 12-18 months, and significantly higher risk of failure. Instead: 1 engineer directing AI agents, 68 days, 662 story points across 199 documented sessions. Engineers at Orbiit don't type code — they specify, review, and enforce standards. The human value is in judgment, not keystrokes.
You're not joining to write Django views. You're joining to lead development — which means specifying what gets built, ensuring it meets standards, and maintaining the architectural integrity as we scale. The AI handles implementation. You handle the thinking. This is what we believe modern engineering leadership is moving towards, and we're defining it in real time.
Documentation isn't bureaucracy — it's what makes AI-first development work. Our ADRs, session logs, and runbooks give AI agents deep context about why things were built the way they were. Docs live in the repo, not in a separate wiki. The documentation IS the project management system.
AI broke the time-effort correlation. We measure complexity delivered, not time spent. Velocity is tracked in story points against git commits — every claim is auditable. Average: 17.5 SP/session across 199 documented sessions.
We have an incredible bias to ship. But the guardrails make that possible — 48 ADRs define architectural boundaries, HIPAA policies cover operational compliance, and runbooks mean incidents have playbooks. The rails are in place so you can move fast without fear.
Our hiring philosophy is language-agnostic. What matters is problem decomposition, system thinking, and learning velocity. AI tools make new frameworks learnable in days, not months.
The org charts above assume we close a raise. There are two realistic paths, and your role looks different depending on which one we take:
| Path A: We Raise | Path B: We Bootstrap | |
|---|---|---|
| Funding | Series A ($3M target) | Angel seed + revenue |
| Your team | Build 4-5 engineers over 12 months | You + CTO + AI tooling for a longer stretch |
| Your role | Director building and leading a team | Senior engineering leader who IS the team |
| Cash comp | Market rate ($180-220K) when raise closes | Lower cash, longer runway to market rate |
| Equity | Meaningful director-level grant | Larger stake reflecting higher risk and ownership |
| Why it works | Traditional scaling with leadership from day one | AI-augmented dev means two senior engineers can ship like a team of 6-8 |
Behavioral health is in a strong tailwind right now. Both paths are real possibilities and we want you to understand what each looks like before we get deeper into conversations. The core role — owning engineering execution for a healthcare platform — is the same either way.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Must Have | Systems thinking. Self-direction. Infrastructure/DevOps experience. Comfort with healthcare compliance. Ability to code AND lead. |
| Strong Plus | IaC experience (Terraform/Bicep). Cloud platform depth (Azure or AWS). CI/CD pipeline ownership. HIPAA or healthcare SaaS background. |
| Nice to Have | Python/Django experience (learnable with AI). Existing AI development workflow (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot). We'll ramp you on the methodology. |
| Critical | You can take ownership of a codebase you didn't write, make it better, and build a team around it — without waiting for permission. |
We're pre-funding. That means equity-heavy compensation with a clear path to market salary when we raise.
| Component | Details |
|---|---|
| Equity | Meaningful equity stake. 4-year vest, 1-year cliff. Director-level grant for a pre-funding hire. |
| Base salary | Cash-constrained until funding. Specific range to be discussed. |
| Post-funding | Market-rate salary ($180-220K range) triggered when Series A closes or revenue threshold is hit. |
The tradeoff is straightforward: below-market cash now in exchange for meaningful ownership in a company that's architecturally ready to scale. The platform is built. The market is real. What's missing is the team. As outlined above, the specific comp mix depends on which funding path we take — but either way, this is a ground-floor equity opportunity.
Interested in learning more? Let's set up a deeper technical conversation.
bert@myorbiit.com 770-605-5410