Chief Technical Officer - Founding Team
Role summary
Therapod AI is seeking a founding CTO/AI Engineer to build an AI-powered mental wellness platform delivered through physical pods and real-time AI experiences. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role focused on shipping product daily and owning the entire technology stack, from frontend and backend to infrastructure and AI integrations. The ideal candidate is a fast, proactive builder comfortable with early-stage chaos and high expectations, who can turn ideas into live experiences rapidly. Experience with real-time systems, LLMs, and hardware integration is a plus. This role offers significant ownership and upside as part of the founding team.
Founding CTO / AI Engineer — Therapod AI
About Therapod AI
Therapod AI is building a new category:
AI-powered mental wellness delivered through physical pods + real-time AI experiences
.
Think:
- AI video wellness coach-style conversations (voice + avatar)
- Beautiful, private pods in universities, hospitals, corporate campuses
- Real-world infrastructure powered by cutting-edge AI
We already have
live deployments, real users, and strong inbound from enterprise partners
.
We’re early, moving fast, and this is a chance to help define an entirely new category.
The Role
We’re looking for a
founding CTO / cracked AI engineer
to build this with us.
This is not a “manage a team and go to meetings” role.
This is:
- You shipping product daily
- You owning the entire stack
- You turning ideas into live experiences in hours, not weeks
Important:
- This is a
founding team role
- Equity-only for now while we raise our seed round
- Massive ownership + upside
If you want comfort, this isn’t it.
If you want to build something that actually matters and moves fast, it is.
What You’ll Actually Do
- Build and ship the core Therapod experience:
- AI conversations (voice + text + avatar)
- Real-time streaming + low latency systems
- Mobile app + web + in-pod interface
- Own the backend (APIs, infra, data, auth, everything)
- Integrate AI models (OpenAI, Gemini, etc.) and make them feel magical
- Optimize latency, cost, and reliability like crazy
- Make hardware + software actually work together in the real world
- Deploy updates to pods in the field without breaking anything
- Rapidly prototype → test → iterate with real users
You’ll go from:
idea → shipped → used by real people …constantly.
What We’re Looking For
- You are
fast
— like actually fast
- You ship more in a week than most teams do in a month
- You use AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, GPT, etc.) as a
multiplier
- You’re comfortable owning everything:
- frontend
- backend
- infra
- AI integrations
- You’ve built real things (not just tutorials)
- You don’t need permission — you just build
- You care about product quality and user experience
Bonus if:
- You’ve worked on real-time systems (voice, streaming, WebRTC)
- You’ve built with LLMs / AI agents
- You’ve hacked on hardware or weird edge environments
What This Is Like
- Early-stage chaos (in a good way)
- Very high ownership
- Very high expectations
- Very fast iteration cycles
- Direct line to founder + real users
Why This Is Interesting
- You’re building
something people physically walk into and use
- Not just another SaaS dashboard
- You get to define:
- AI + mental health UX
- real-time human + AI interaction
- hardware + software experiences
- Already seeing
real demand from universities, healthcare, and enterprise