Co-founder / Software Engineer

Company Description

Ocean Labs is building a two-sided platform for mental health care. Practice management tools for clinicians on one side, and ML-powered client-clinician matching on the other. No one in the market is combining practice management and ML matching in a single ecosystem.

The clinician side replaces a fragmented stack (EHR, billing, scheduling, marketing, etc) that costs private practitioners $500-$1000/month across multiple tools/services. We consolidate this at $200/month – and unlike other platforms, clinicians keep full ownership of their practice and 100% of their session revenue. No revenue share.

The client side replaces static directories like Psychology Today with an Intelligent Matching Engine. Instead of scrolling through listings and guessing, clients describe why they're looking for a therapist and get matched across 50+ factors such as therapeutic approach, specialization, insurance, availability, etc. The goal is the right clinician the first time, not the third.

The competitive window is real, and while the rest of the industry is busy consolidating and integrating, we will spend that time innovating and actually shipping an experience that benefits both clients and clinicians. We know that our moat is not practice management features (AI is commoditizing those), our real moat is the two-sided network effect and the quality of the matching engine.

Current Status

Initial direction set:
Product strategy, identifying target markets, business/revenue models

In progress:
Designs, fundraising (I have been actively meeting with VCs & Angel Investors)

Up next:
Creating a demo that can be used for fundraising as well as an early alpha

The Role

Ocean Labs is looking for a Co-Founder & CTO to build this company alongside me. It’s not just technical ownership, you’ll help me to shape product direction, fundraising strategy, and what Ocean becomes. This is a partnership, not a hire.

More important than professional background, you need to care about creating a first-class experience for the people who actually use this platform — this will always be more important than a unique engineering solution — and be willing to look beyond 'good enough' for solutions outside the status quo. We will be working together daily. I expect you to challenge my assumptions, push back when you disagree, and bring ideas I haven't thought of — and I'll do the same.

Qualifications

• You've built and shipped products. Whether that was your own side project, an MVP at an early-stage startup, or something else you took from zero to users. You've been close enough to the full lifecycle to know what it actually takes.
• You have a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• You've worked in an early-stage environment (pre-seed, seed, or similarly scrappy). You're comfortable making architectural decisions without perfect information and owning the consequences.
• You can build across the stack. Our current direction is iOS-first with a web platform alongside it — Swift/SwiftUI on the mobile side, React with a BaaS like Supabase on the web. You should have experience across native mobile and modern web development. As co-founder, you'll have a real voice in how — and whether — this stack evolves.
• You have a working understanding of healthcare data privacy and compliance (HIPAA). You don't need to be a compliance officer, but you need to know what building in this space requires and take it seriously.
• You've thought critically about how AI can improve real products — not just tacked it onto a feature list. Whether that's matching algorithms, NLP, or workflow automation, you can distinguish between where AI adds value and where it's noise.
• You're opinionated about user experience. You'll push back on a technically sound solution if it creates a bad experience for the person using it.
• You're comfortable in a room with investors. You don't need to love fundraising, but you can articulate technical vision and product strategy to non-technical stakeholders.
• You're based in New York City, United States

If you don't check every box but you're passionate about what we're building – apply anyway

Technical Challenges

These are some of the engineering problems you'll own:

- Matching engine:
We have a working demo (
tryocean.io
) with a multi-phase matching pipeline that goes well beyond directory-style filtering. The system combines clinical assessment, NLP-driven intake processing, therapeutic style alignment, and semantic similarity scoring to produce high-confidence matches across 50+ factors. Phase 2 (in testing) adds deeper language analysis and embedding-based matching. The work ahead: hardening Phase 2 for production, building the clinician feedback loop, and scaling the pipeline as the network grows.
- HIPAA-compliant infrastructure:
Everything we build handles PHI — diagnosis codes, session notes, billing data. The architecture needs to support local ML embeddings for PII compliance, end-to-end encryption, and audit logging from day one. This isn't an afterthought.
- Insurance and billing integration:
EDI 270/271 for eligibility verification, 837P for claims submission, 835/ERA for remittance processing. Clearinghouse integration (likely Stedi) and eventually payer credentialing workflows.
- Two-sided marketplace cold start:
Solving the chicken-and-egg problem technically — the clinician SaaS has to deliver standalone value (EHR, billing, scheduling) before the matching side has critical mass on the client side.
- Real-time EHR:
Building practice management tooling (scheduling, documentation, billing, client portal) that's competitive with SimplePractice and TherapyNotes on UX while being architected to feed data back into the matching engine.

The Future

Mental health care is deeply personal to me. It has truly changed my life for the better, and I can only imagine where I would be without it. But the future of this company doesn't end at mental health care. The problems clinicians and patients face aren't unique to therapy. Fragmented care, administrative burden, and poor matching exist across healthcare – and actively affect patient outcomes. What we build today becomes the foundation for tackling those same problems in other disciplines.

Equity / Location

We don't have an office yet, so we'll co-work together regularly until we do. Until we secure funding, this position is equity-only. The equity split will be in the range of 25-40%, based on experience and what you bring to the table. Vesting follows a standard 4-year schedule with a 1-year cliff. We're unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.

Interested?

This is an opportunity to get in at the literal ground level, solving important problems for real people. If you are interested in joining, please reach out to hiring@tryocean.io with your resume, portfolio, and a few sentences about why you'd be the right partner for this.