Founding Software Engineer

Language shouldn’t determine the quality of care, but for 30 million patients in the U.S., it still does.

Lexi is an early stage Harvard–backed startup building AI-native, real-time medical interpretation so clinicians and patients can communicate clearly across languages. Every day, clinicians lose precious time and patients face preventable risks because they can’t speak the same language, while traditional interpretation services remain slow, costly, and inconsistent in quality. For patients with limited English proficiency, this shapes every encounter with the health system.

We’re building the multilingual communication layer for healthcare to deliver real-time, medically accurate, voice-to-voice interpretation using advanced speech processing and multilingual AI. Lexi is optimized for clinical workflows and engineered with HIPAA-grade privacy to protect patient data.

We’re proud to have won the Grand Prize at the HBS New Venture Competition and the iF Design Gold Award (alongside Apple and IBM), and the HLTH Health Equity Pitch. We’re backed by leading investors, healthcare executives, and technologists who believe that language equity is one of the most overlooked yet urgent problems in modern healthcare, and one that, once solved, will have a profound impact on everyday life.

Most importantly, Lexi is live in real-world settings, with users actively using the platform every day!

This is a rare opportunity to build a category-defining product with real-world impact at the moment when healthcare, AI, and language access are converging.

The Role

We’re hiring a Founding Software Engineer to help architect the core systems behind Lexi’s real-time medical interpretation platform. You’ll work directly with the founding team to design scalable, secure, and ultra–low-latency infrastructure, and build the clinician- and patient-facing tools that sit at the heart of the product.

You’ll work across backend services, cloud infrastructure, real-time audio and streaming workflows, and front-end product interfaces, helping us deliver reliable, subsecond experiences in clinical environments. You’ll collaborate closely with our ML team to integrate and productionize AI models for speech recognition, translation, dialogue, and culturally informed language understanding.

If you’re the kind of engineer who gets energy from seeing your work used in the real world, this role will feel meaningful. You’ll own systems that change how patients and clinicians experience care the moment your code ships. We’re looking for someone who thrives in fast, deeply technical environments and enjoys working across cloud infrastructure, backend systems, and real-time data flows. As one of Lexi’s first in-house engineers, you’ll set foundational engineering standards, influence product direction, and build systems that meet the safety, reliability, and performance demands of healthcare.

What You'll Do

• Own architecture across the full stack, from backend services to cloud infrastructure to clinician- and patient-facing interfaces.
• Develop backend services supporting real-time audio, translation workflows, session management, and secure data flows.
• Architect and scale cloud systems (AWS/GCP/etc), ensuring high availability, observability, and robust performance.
• Implement best-in-class security and compliance practices for sensitive medical audio and text data.
• Build intuitive, responsive UIs using React / Next.js and modern web frameworks.
• Design and optimize streaming workflows, including audio ingestion, parsing, and processing for subsecond performance.
• Build and maintain APIs, webhooks, event pipelines, and data models that drive real-time communication and interaction.
• Integrate and deploy AI/ML models, including GPU-based inference, model orchestration, and performance optimization.
• Contribute to DevOps and platform engineering, including CI/CD automation, monitoring, logging, and system reliability.
• Collaborate closely with product, design partners, and clinical advisors to ship safe, reliable, production-grade tools for healthcare environments.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience as a full-stack, backend, or infrastructure engineer.
• Strong experience with React, Node.js, and modern API/web application architecture.
• Proficiency with AWS/GCP, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CDK), and distributed system design.
• Familiarity with Python for backend services, data processing, and ML integration.
• Experience with real-time systems: audio streaming, media pipelines, or low-latency processing.
• Hands-on experience with REST APIs, event-driven architecture, and webhook-based integrations.
• Strong grasp of security, privacy, encryption, and high-availability architectures.
• Exposure to AI/ML model deployment, GPU inference, or distributed model serving.
• Strong architectural thinking and ability to drive projects from conception to production.
• Startup mindset: proactive, fast-moving, comfortable with ambiguity, excited to own problems end-to-end!

Nice To Have

• Healthcare experience or familiarity with clinical workflows, EHR systems, or regulated environments.
• Experience with voice AI, ML ops, or building model-driven real-time products.
• Background in NLP, speech recognition, speech synthesis, or audio signal processing.
• Knowledge of cloud security, privacy, compliance, or enterprise-grade architectures (HIPAA, SOC2, etc.).
• Experience scaling data-intensive pipelines or working with multilingual speech datasets.
• Speak a language other than English :)

About the Team

We are a mission-driven team of engineers, designers, linguists, and healthcare experts from Harvard, MIT, and Brown, with deep experience building and commercializing cutting-edge technology, including healthcare products at Philips and Mass General Brigham, autonomous vehicles, NASA JPL research, and genomics and sequencing platforms. We move quickly, obsess over reliability and user experience, and believe in building technology that expands access for all. Many of us have experienced language barriers firsthand – both personally and within our communities – which grounds our work in lived experience as much as technical ambition.

Send your resume to [email protected] , we’d love to chat!