Member of Technical Staff
Members of Technical Staff at Norma are senior generalist engineers who set the technical direction of the company. You won't just ship features — you'll define how we build, what we build, and why. You'll make decisions that compound: choosing the right architecture, setting quality standards, and building systems that scale as we grow from thousands of users to millions.
We're a small team. There's no layer of management between you and the problem. You'll talk to users, understand the constraints, make the call, and build the thing. You'll also raise the bar for everyone around you — through code review, technical mentorship, and by example.
This role is for someone who has already built and shipped systems that matter. You've seen what works and what doesn't at scale. You have the judgment to know when to over-engineer and when to cut corners — and you're almost always right about which is which.
How We Build
We don't just build AI — we build with AI. Every engineer at Norma 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
- •Architecting and building the core AI companion platform — voice, conversation, memory, personalization, safety
- •Designing systems that are reliable and performant for a user base that has zero tolerance for broken technology
- •Building and scaling ML infrastructure: model serving, fine-tuning pipelines, evaluation frameworks, inference optimization
- •Making critical build-vs-buy decisions on infrastructure, tooling, and third-party integrations
- •Designing data architecture and pipelines for a HIPAA-compliant, AI-native healthcare product
- •Leading technical design of partner integration systems that need to work across diverse healthcare and senior living environments
- •Defining engineering practices, tooling, and culture as we scale the team
- •Solving problems no one has solved before — we're building a new category of product for an underserved population, and the playbook doesn't exist yet
Who You Are
- •6+ years of experience building and shipping production software, with a track record of owning technically complex systems end-to-end
- •You've been the person other engineers go to when something is hard — not because of your title, but because of your judgment
- •Deep expertise in at least one area (backend systems, ML/AI, infrastructure, distributed systems) and strong fluency across the rest
- •You make teams better. You've mentored junior engineers, driven technical quality through code review, or shaped engineering culture at a previous company
- •You think in tradeoffs, not absolutes. You know when to build for scale and when to ship a prototype — and you can articulate why
- •You can go from whiteboard to production. You're as comfortable designing a system as you are debugging it at 2am
- •You default to ownership: if something is broken and it's in your path, you fix it — whether or not it's "your code"
- •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 in production (RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evals, guardrails)
- •Experience with voice/audio AI systems or real-time conversational AI
- •Experience building in regulated environments (HIPAA, SOC 2, FDA)
- •You've been an early engineer at a startup and know what it means to build from zero
- •Contributions to open-source, published research, or technical writing that demonstrates depth of thinking
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 — at this level we hire for engineering depth, not language familiarity.
What You Get
- •Technical leadership role at a well-funded AI company with a massive market opportunity
- •Foundational influence on architecture, culture, and engineering practices — you're not inheriting tech debt, you're building the foundation
- •Small team, high ownership — your decisions shape the product and the company
- •Direct exposure to the full business: product, partnerships, go-to-market — not just your IDE
- •Competitive compensation (salary + significant equity)
- •The chance to build something that actually helps people
How to Apply
Send an email to steve@normahealth.com with:
- Your resume
- A link to something you've built or a system you're proud of — GitHub, a technical blog post, a design doc, an architecture you led
- A short note (2-3 sentences) on why Norma
We review every application. No recruiter screens — engineers review engineers.
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