Software Engineer

About Ocean Friends Ocean Friends is a fast-growing, profitable healthcare tech startup focused on empowering pediatric therapy centers (Speech, OT, PT) with powerful automation, AI agents, and data-driven insights. Our mission is simple but ambitious : use technology to give every child with special needs a greater sense of purpose, progress, and joy.

We build tools that help therapists, parents, and care teams work together effortlessly—so more time goes to the child, not paperwork.

Role Overview We are looking for a Software Engineer (AI & Business Systems) who is passionate about using AI to make a real-world difference in children's lives. This is not a “backend research” or “ML-only” role—it's a full-spectrum technology + business + product thinking position .

You will :

Build AI-powered agents, copilots, and automation workflows used daily by therapists and families

Stay on the cutting edge of the AI ecosystem (agents, RAG, speech models, multimodal, reasoning engines)

Translate business problems into elegant systems and intelligent tools

Work deeply with founders, users, and therapy centers to understand what actually moves the needle

Develop robust, scalable backend services (Python + GCP preferred) that power our core platform

Business understanding is nearly more important than pure technical skill.

Your superpower should be connecting therapy workflows, parent journeys, and business needs to AI capabilities.

What You’ll Do AI & Product Build and maintain AI agents for scheduling, claims, parent journaling, therapist documentation, and more

Evaluate, experiment, and integrate new AI models and tools quickly

Design systems that combine deterministic rules with LLM reasoning

Create delightful experiences for therapists, parents, and admin teams

Engineering Develop scalable microservices on GCP (Cloud Run, Firestore, BigQuery, Pub / Sub)

Write clean, maintainable Python or TypeScript code

Work with structured / unstructured data, PDFs, audio, and multimodal features

Build APIs, automation pipelines, and real-time event systems

Business & Domain Understanding Work closely with founders and customers to understand therapy workflows

Translate customer needs into product features

Use empathy and curiosity to understand how your work impacts children, parents, and therapists

Make product decisions that balance business value, ROI, usability, and technical feasibility

Who You Are Human-centric Mission-driven—excited about helping kids and families

Empathetic and comfortable talking to non-technical users

Curious about therapy, parent journeys, and clinic operations

AI-native Strong understanding of the AI agent ecosystem

Hands-on experience with LLMs, vector search, multimodal inputs, or agent frameworks

Comfortable evaluating multiple models and picking the right tool for the job

Stays current with the rapidly evolving AI landscape

Product + Business minded Understands how product decisions affect revenue, workflows, and outcomes

Thinks in terms of ROI, effort-vs-impact, and user happiness

Thrives in ambiguity and can define the problem before solving it

Technical skills Strong Python or TypeScript / Node

Experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferred)

Understanding of basic ML / AI concepts (RAG, embeddings, model evaluation, prompting)

Ability to ship quickly and iterate

Nice to Have Experience in healthcare, education, or therapy tech

UI / UX empathy and ability to design intuitive workflows

Experience with FastAPI, React, or BigQuery

Familiarity with HIPAA and secure data handling

Why Ocean Friends Mission-driven team improving lives of children every day

Work directly with founders—zero bureaucracy

Modern tech stack and an environment that embraces AI deeply

Huge ownership over product direction and outcomes

A profitable, growing company where your work has immediate real-world impact