Head of Engineering at WellTheory

WellTheory is a digital health company helping people with autoimmune conditions take control of their health through personalized care, nutrition guidance, and ongoing coaching. The company consists of 60+ passionate people dedicated to helping members reduce symptoms, feel better, and live fuller lives while reducing employer and payor spend.

About the Role

WellTheory is hiring its first Head of Engineering. This is a player-coach role where you will lead a talented, largely self-directed team and set the standards for building processes, quality bar, technical direction, and hiring.

You will report to the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer and spend 20-30% of your time in the codebase, with the rest focused on leading the team, shaping the platform, and collaborating with product, design, and leadership.

WellTheory operates as a Series A company but functions like a much larger organization. The team builds the member app, in-house tools for the Care Team, and the insurance and data infrastructure connecting employers, health plans, and channel partners. All systems must comply with HIPAA and SOC 2 Type 2 standards.

We are seeking a leader with experience in scaling teams, making strategic architectural decisions, and empowering high-achieving engineers.

What You'll Do

• Build and grow the team. Conduct 1:1s, set high performance standards, and manage hiring, performance, and career growth.

• Define how we ship. Design planning, code review, testing, release, and incident practices that balance speed for a small AI-native team with rigorous compliance requirements.

• Set technical direction. Make foundational architecture decisions with the founding engineer to ensure velocity is maintained as the team and member base scale.

• Own platform and DevOps. Develop the roadmap, including non-production environments that keep Protected Health Information (PHI) out of day-to-day development.

• Build compliance in, not on. Collaborate with operations and compliance leads to ensure engineering adheres to HIPAA, SOC 2, and HITRUST standards.

• Make AI core to how we build. Implement coding agents, evaluations, and internal tooling to enhance every engineer’s productivity.

• Stay hands-on. Review code, pair on complex problems, and ship when it maximizes your impact.

• Shape the roadmap. Partner with the Staff Product Manager and Product Design Lead to determine scope and make trade-offs.

• Speak for engineering. Represent the team at leadership meetings.

You Might Be a Great Fit If You...

• Have led engineering teams through growth. Experience managing senior individual contributors, building teams, and addressing challenges at each growth stage.

• Have built in a regulated environment. Background in healthcare, fintech, or another industry where data handling, security, and audits influence development processes. Treat compliance as a baseline requirement.

• Spot great talent. Ability to distinguish between great and good candidates during interviews and code reviews, and hire for potential.

• Stay hands-on. Recent experience shipping production TypeScript or JavaScript and a desire to continue doing so.

• Own systems. Responsibility for reliability, observability, environments, and incident response, not delegated to others.

• Change how a team works with AI. Knowledge of leveraging AI to increase team productivity without compromising quality.

• Partner without ego. Willingness to share ownership with strong product, design, and engineering leads and empower the existing team.

• Have partnered closely with product and design. Experience working in a collaborative model where engineering, product, and design shape the roadmap together.

• Communicate clearly. Ability to write down decisions and document processes, given the fully remote and small team structure.

This position requires current work authorization in the United States. WellTheory is unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time. The role is US-based and requires access to protected health information.Bonus Points

• Experience in digital health or B2B2C healthcare and understanding of eligibility, claims, or care delivery tooling.
• Experience leading a SOC 2 or HITRUST effort from the engineering side.
• Recognized as a