Full-Time

Founding Engineer

Updated on 8/1/2026

Terrarium

Terrarium

11-50 employees

Venture studio incubating healthcare technology startups

Compensation Overview

$150k - $180k/yr

New York, NY, USA

Hybrid

Hybrid work in New York City.

Category
Software Engineering (1)

Get referred to Terrarium

See people who can refer or advise you

Requirements
  • Experience building real systems from scratch and taking ownership of problems end-to-end.
  • Ability to figure things out, move quickly, and make progress without waiting for perfect requirements or conditions.
  • Ability to work effectively in ambiguity and chaos with clear goals and minimal hand-holding or process.
  • Strong interest in solving difficult healthcare problems that improve outcomes for seniors and families.
  • First-principles thinking, strong technical judgment, pragmatic architecture decision-making, and the ability to ship high-quality work quickly.
  • Willingness to work with the intensity and ownership expected at the earliest stage of a company.
Responsibilities
  • Build the core platform from scratch as the first engineer and technical leader.
  • Own architecture, data systems, ingestion pipelines, the intelligence layer, and the initial agentic systems.
  • Pull and structure data from across the healthcare system and combine it with context about family, caretakers, medications, appointments, and daily life.
  • Use artificial intelligence to analyze the complete record, detect gaps and risks, and prioritize important issues.
  • Build agents that execute coordination work such as scheduling, logistics, reconciliation, and documentation while keeping the human navigator informed.
  • Ensure every action is properly documented and auditable for responsible scaling.
  • Make high-leverage technical decisions, ship quickly, and own outcomes end-to-end with minimal process.
  • Define how the platform works in this 0-to-1 role.

Terrarium is a health-tech venture studio that incubates and seeds early-stage healthcare technology companies. It accelerates the startup journey by providing validated concepts, initial capital, and access to a network of clinical and industry relationships, giving founders a solid concept and about two years of runway. It operates from the -1 to 0 stage and plans to build up to ten companies in three years, with founders retaining a majority ownership after financing, focusing on four themes: healthcare data and AI, value-based care and specialty medicine, workforce management, and the healthcare financial system, and it partners with Cactus and Wellstar Health System for clinical expertise and commercialization pathways. Its goal is to de-risk early ideas and help portfolio companies reach market and scale in the health-tech space.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

Town of Islip, New York

Founded

2024

Get referred to Terrarium

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Health-system embedded pilots can shorten commercialization and procurement cycles.
  • The EIR program compresses validation into four months and often yields a design partner.
  • Rota Health shows an initial wedge in healthcare data interoperability.

What critics are saying

  • A weak first company would undermine Terrarium’s core validation thesis.
  • Small volume concentrates execution risk across only ten companies in three years.
  • Heavy dependence on health-system partners exposes commercialization to procurement delays and budget shifts.

What makes Terrarium unique

  • Founded in 2024 by Company Ventures, Terrarium targets healthcare startups from -1 to 0.
  • Terrarium pairs thesis-driven research with health-system partners Cactus and Wellstar.
  • Founders begin with validated ideas, dedicated capital, and roughly two years of runway.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

Hybrid Work Options