Founding Product Engineer - Clinical Systems
- Location
- Los Angeles, CA
- Work type
- Full Time
- Posted
- 2026-08-25
Job description
The Role
RDI is building the software that runs a modern diagnostics CRO.
We already have working internal products, real clinical workflows, real users, and a clear list of problems worth solving. We now need an engineer to take technical ownership of the platform and turn rapid product development into a durable engineering capability.
This is an unusually broad engineering job.
You will work directly with the CEO and the people using the software. You will understand the problem, decide what should be built, write the code, ship it, see how it performs in the real world, and remain responsible when something breaks.
You own the outcome, not the ticket.
If you are capable of substantially more than the slice of the system your current company lets you touch, that is the point of this role.
The Work
You will:
Own and improve the internal software RDI already uses to run clinical studies.
Build new products across study planning, operations, data, regulatory workflows, and automation.
Turn rapidly developed prototypes into reliable production systems.
Own architecture, testing, CI/CD, monitoring, authentication, security, migrations, and production reliability.
Work directly with clinical, laboratory, data, and operating teams instead of receiving requirements through layers of product management.
Understand ugly real-world workflows and make them simpler.
Use AI aggressively where it creates leverage without outsourcing engineering judgment to it.
Decide what should be built, bought, integrated, automated, or left alone.
Diagnose failures to root cause and improve the system rather than patching symptoms.
Establish the engineering standards that future engineers at RDI will inherit.
Who We Are Looking For
You are a product engineer who can actually ship production software.
You are comfortable across the stack and comfortable inheriting code you did not write. You care about users, reliability, data integrity, and whether the system actually solves the problem.
You do not need a product manager to turn an ambiguous problem into a specification before you can start thinking.
You probably have enough experience to know what good engineering looks like and enough ambition that you still want to build it yourself.
Experience in healthcare, clinical research, regulated software, or life sciences is useful but not required. Intellectual curiosity is.
What We Are Not Looking For
An engineering manager who no longer wants to code.
Someone who needs a PM, designer, QA team, and detailed ticket before work can begin.
Someone who wants to spend months debating architecture before users see anything.
Someone interested in AI-generated code but not accountable for what happens after it ships.
Someone who considers unfamiliar code beneath them.
Someone looking for a comfortable seat inside a large engineering organization.
You will have more surface area here than at a company many times our size.
That is both the opportunity and the cost.