Founding Engineer Mobile + Full Stack

Full-time · [Remote hiring location] · $160,000–$200,000 base + 0.5%–2.0% equity

WHO WE ARE

Decibella is transforming into voice a vital sign for women’s health. The vocal tract contains both estrogen and progesterone receptors, which can subtly alter speech production as hormone levels fluctuate.

Voice biomarker research is rapidly advancing across Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart and lung health, as well as various psychiatric disorders. Unfortunately, women's health has progressed much slower, largely due to lack of resources: ~5% of global research funding goes towards non-cancer women's health. Our mission is to change that by building a tool that enables women to come together as a community and advance the research for women's health.

Users complete daily speech tasks (~60s) alongside tracking menstruation, symptoms, medications and wearables tracking. Our pipeline converts those recordings into acoustic measurements and helps users understand how their voice changes in relation to hormonal shifts. Decibella is live on both iOS and Android.

We're very early, but in the four weeks since our beta we've grown to:

• 250+ users
• 81% activation -> 68% D10 retention
• 14 countries
• 3,000+ speech samples
• 35+ diagnoses, many of which have never been studied.

HOW WE'LL WORK TOGETHER

You'll work directly with me, Ivy, Decibella's founder. From day one you'll own technical direction, architecture, production standards, and release decisions.

I'm self-taught and built V1 to get us here. I want to stay hands-on with prototyping and lower-risk work, collaborating within the development and review process you establish. Over time, I'll focus increasingly on product, users, research, partnerships, and fundraising while you build and lead Decibella's engineering function.

Where this role goes: This is a ground-floor role with unusual room to grow. We're actively raising, our resources are expanding, and as the team scales, this position is built to grow into engineering leadership.

Current stack: React Native + TypeScript (iOS and Android) · Appwrite backend · Python acoustic-processing services on Modal (serverless) · Praat/Parselmouth feature extraction · Apple HealthKit, Android Health Connect & Oura integrations · XState + TanStack Query · Skia-rendered data visualizations · PostHog · Sentry · EAS build pipeline with staging/production environments

REQUIREMENTS

• End-to-end mobile release experience. You have personally shipped and operated applications on both iOS and Android and are comfortable with signing and provisioning, TestFlight and Play testing tracks, store review, versioning, over-the-air updates, and production releases.
• Deep production experience with React Native and TypeScript. You understand component and render lifecycles, state management, and mobile performance. You are also comfortable using tools like React Native Skia and Reanimated to build polished, user-facing dashboards and highly performant data visualizations.
• Backend and data-platform experience. You can design and consume versioned APIs; work with authentication, OAuth, databases, and object storage; and own serverless or event-driven services, schema migrations, and data integrity. Experience with Appwrite, Firebase, Supabase, AWS, or comparable platforms.
• Proficiency in Python. You can maintain production Python services and data-processing jobs, including scheduled or event-triggered workflows, retries, idempotency, backfills, error handling, and observability.
• Strong testing and operational fundamentals. You have implemented meaningful unit and integration testing, CI/CD, monitoring, structured logging, crash reporting, and production-debugging practices. You know how to identify where additional engineering rigor will materially reduce risk.
• Security and privacy fundamentals. You understand authentication and authorization, secrets management, least-privilege access, encryption in transit and at rest, secure data handling, retention, export, and deletion. Experience handling health, biometric, or similarly sensitive data is extremely valuable.

YOU'LL BE A GREAT FIT IF

• You're excited about the science behind Decibella and excited about advancing women's health research
• A deep empathy for the challenges surrounding women’s health, and a genuine passion for changing how these conditions are understood and researched.
• Have strong product instincts and are excited to actively shape what we build. You're eager to contribute your own ideas and collaborate on the 'what' and 'why' of a feature, not just the 'how'.
• You are a natural teacher and a collaborative partner. The founder is self-taught and built the V1 to get us here, but eager to keep leveling up her own engineering skills. You'll thrive if you enjoy sharing knowledge, explaining tradeoffs, and acting as a true technical mentor so she can continue building alongside you.
• Can explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to people across product, research, design, and engineering.
• Care deeply about privacy and understand that reproductive-health and voice data require a higher standard of care than an ordinary consumer application.

NICE TO HAVES

• Audio capture, DSP, speech processing, Praat/Parselmouth, or real-time media systems.
• ML feature pipelines, scientific-computing workflows, or production data processing.
• Apple HealthKit, Android Health Connect, Oura, wearable APIs, sensors, or biometric data.
• Experience in regulated healthcare, clinical research, or consumer-health privacy.
• Experience as a founding engineer or taking a product from zero to one.

COMPENSATION + BENEFITS

We're a pre-seed company and want to be transparent about what we can offer at the moment so you can determine whether it'd be a good fit.

Today:

• $160,000–$200,000 base salary + 0.5%–2.0% equity, flexible based on experience, scope, and your preferred cash-equity mix. Equity is granted as stock options with standard four-year vesting and a one-year cliff.
• Flexible paid time off (PTO), plus paid sick leave as required by applicable law.
• A new laptop and a $500 one-time home office stipend to build your ideal workspace.
• Remote-first flexibility in how and where you work

What we don't offer yet: group health insurance or a 401(k). As we close our round and grow, benefits will expand (and as the first hire, you'll have a genuine say in what we build).

Decibella is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and identities, including people historically underrepresented in engineering.