Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering | Kinetic Trials

Location: NYC 

Compensation: Competitive salary + significant equity (founding team)

About Kinetic Trials

Kinetic Trials is building the agentic operating platform for clinical trial operations. We partner with site management organizations, academic medical centers, health systems and independent trial sites to drive revenue, automate administrative tasks and augment people-centric workflows. Our goal is to accelerate the drug development lifecycle and make a tangible impact on getting promising therapies into the hands of patients faster.

We're backed by top-tier early stage investors (previously backed Palantir, Lyft, Gitlab, Square) and working closely with design partners to build the product.

The Role

We're looking for a Head of Engineering to own our technical direction and accelerate product development alongside our design partners. This is a hands-on building role—you'll be writing code daily while shaping architecture and hiring decisions that will define the company for years to come. As we grow, this role has a clear path to CTO. 

What You'll Do

• Own the full technical stack end-to-end (frontend, backend, AI/LLM integration, infrastructure)

• Work directly with the CEO and design partners to translate customer needs into product - shipping quickly and iteratively

• Architect agentic AI systems that automate complex, people-centric workflows

• Make foundational architecture decisions for scale

• Eventually hire and lead the engineering team

What We're Looking For

• 3 to 5+ years of software engineering experience

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic AI systems 

• Proficient with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to maximize velocity

• Strong full-stack skills 

• Bias toward shipping over perfection; comfortable with ambiguity

• Excited by healthcare/life sciences impact (domain experience not required)

Why Join

• Ground-floor equity in a company targeting a $50B+ market with no dominant software solution

• Founder has deep domain expertise from leading M&A deals in clinical research

• Strong validation from industry leaders in the category (many of which are on Kinetic's Advisory Board)

• Clear, defensible initial wedge with highly visible expansion path to broader clinical trial operations