Founding Engineer
Bearfoot AI · San Francisco / Palo Alto / Los Angeles / Torrance, CA · In-person · Full-time
About Bearfoot
Bearfoot AI builds agentic AI systems for the healthcare front office. Our voice agents answer every call, book appointments, verify insurance, explain bills, and collect payments for dental and medical practices — 24/7, without a ring going unanswered. We're not building another IVR tree; we're building AI that takes on complex, human-facing work with real autonomy and real empathy, and that patients and practices actually want to talk to.
We're venture-backed and early, but the product is already live with real practices — built for fast onboarding, high reliability, and the compliance bar (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2 Type II) that healthcare demands from day one.
About This Role
You'd be our first engineering hire — not joining an established team, but helping decide what "established" looks like. This posting is intentionally general. We're hiring across the full range of what it takes to build reliable, real-time voice agents in a regulated industry, and the specifics of the role will take shape around whoever we bring on. We'll keep refining this posting as we hire our second and third engineers, too.
What We're Looking For
- Generalist engineers comfortable moving across the stack — voice/telephony infrastructure, LLM orchestration and agent design, backend services, or integrations with practice management systems (Dentrix, Eaglesoft, OpenDental, Epic, Athenahealth, and others)
- People who are energized by ambiguity and want to own a problem end to end, from first prototype to production
- A bias toward shipping and iterating with real customers, not building in a vacuum
- Comfort operating in a regulated, trust-sensitive space, where reliability matters as much as speed
- Excitement about being one of the first engineers at a venture-backed startup, and about shaping the engineering culture rather than just joining one
Life at Bearfoot
- A small, in-person team based across our California hubs — San Francisco, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, and Torrance — working closely together, not over Slack threads
- Early-stage pace: high autonomy, high ownership, and a short distance between idea and production
- Direct exposure to customers — dental and medical practices — and to the real-world impact of your work on their business
Compensation & Equity
$180,000 – $220,000 base salary + 0.75% – 1.5% equity, commensurate with experience and as one of our earliest engineering hires.
Candidates must already be authorized to work in the U.S. — we are unable to sponsor visas for this role.
How to Apply
Email careers@bearfoot.ai with your resume and a note on what you'd want to build here.
Bearfoot AI is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, national origin, protected veteran status, race, religion, pregnancy, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.