The Problem We're Solving

IVF is one of the most emotionally and financially demanding medical journeys a person goes through — and it has a retention problem. Patients drop out mid-cycle, miss critical medication windows, and lose trust in their clinics. Often not because of clinical failure, but because the experience around the clinical care is broken.

1 in 3 patients who begin IVF never complete treatment. The leading cause isn't poor prognosis or cost — it's psychological burden, physical overwhelm, and the absence of structured support between clinic visits. These are software-solvable problems.

Ferva Health is building the patient engagement platform that fixes this — starting with IVF clinics in India, expanding to the US. We're early, stealth, and just getting going.

The Role

You'll be the first engineer. That means you own the stack — the patient-facing mobile app, the clinic-facing portal, the backend that connects them, and the infrastructure decisions that will matter in two years. You'll work directly with the founder on product, ship the things you decide are worth shipping, and shape the engineering culture before there is one to inherit.

This is a build role, not a manage role — at least for the first 12 months. After that, it's whatever you want it to become. We expect you to hire the second and third engineers when the time is right, and we'll support you in doing that. But for now, you ship.

You'll have access to an existing React prototype suite — a patient app, a clinic portal, and an onboarding flow — built to validate the concept. Your job is to take that foundation and turn it into a production system that real clinics can actually run their patients through.

What You'll Do in the First 6 Months

• Take the prototype to production. The existing React suite (patient app, clinic portal, onboarding flow) proves the concept. You'll architect and build the production version — hardened, compliant, and ready for real patients and real clinics.

• Design and build the backend from scratch. Data model, APIs, integrations, infrastructure. You'll make the foundational decisions — and own them.

• Embed with pilot clinics. Talking directly to doctors, nurses, and patients, then translating what you learn into product decisions. The person writing the code should also be watching the users.

• Make the architectural decisions that compound. HIPAA and SOC 2 for the US expansion. DPDP Act and ART Act compliance for India. Multi-tenancy across clinic partners. These decisions live in your code eventually — they need to be made right, early.

• Set the engineering foundation. Code standards, testing approach, deploy pipeline, incident response. Before there's a team, there's a culture. You're writing the first draft of it.

• Hire engineers two and three, when the time comes — with full involvement in who joins and why.

You Might Be a Fit If…

• You have 6+ years of engineering experience and have shipped real products end-to-end — ideally at a startup where you owned more than one layer of the stack.

• You're strong in React and TypeScript on the frontend, and comfortable owning a Node or Python backend — or ready to make the case for something else and defend it.

• You've worked in a domain where compliance isn't optional— healthcare, fintech, legal, or similar — or you understand exactly why it's non-negotiable and you're ready to learn fast.

• You think in products, not tickets. You'd rather spend 30 minutes with a clinic nurse understanding her workflow than 30 minutes in an architecture debate that doesn't yet have a real constraint.

• You want to be employee #1, not employee #50. You're energised by the ambiguity and the ownership that comes with being first — not unsettled by it.

• You care about the problem. Not everyone needs to have personal experience with IVF or fertility treatment. But you need to find the problem genuinely worth solving — and you need to be able to explain why, clearly, in the interview.

What We Offer

Meaningful equity — the kind of stake that actually matters if this works. We'll discuss specifics in the first conversation. We believe in transparency on this.

A real seat at the table on product, hiring, and company direction — not just engineering decisions. The first engineer at Ferva shapes what Ferva becomes, and we mean that literally.

Compensation that reflects early-stage reality — strong equity, fair cash, with both growing as we raise. We won't lowball you on salary to compensate with equity promises. We'll be honest about the tradeoffs.

• The chance to build something in women's health and fertility that genuinely changes clinical outcomes — with a clear causal line between your code and a patient completing their IVF cycle

• Remote-first with occasional travel to clinic partners in India, and eventually the US as we expand

• Full involvement in hiring engineers two and three — you won't inherit a team, you'll build one

• Direct working relationship with the founder — not mediated through layers of management that don't exist yet