Founding Product Engineer

📋 Description

• • Meridio is seeking a visionary Founding Product Engineer to architect and build the foundational systems that will revolutionize health benefits for small businesses. As a remote-first company, we are on a mission to make health benefits simple, affordable, and accessible for businesses of all sizes. This is a unique opportunity to be a technical leader from the ground up, shaping the core of our product and influencing its future direction. You will be instrumental in creating a seamless and intuitive experience for both our B2B clients and their B2C users, ensuring our platform scales effortlessly as we grow.
• • In this pivotal role, you will be responsible for architecting our core application framework, designing the interaction model that bridges the gap between business needs and employee experience, and shipping the foundational utilities that power our entire platform. You will be deeply hands-on, writing code, meticulously reviewing pull requests, and ensuring that we build robust, high-quality systems from the outset. Your work will directly impact the usability and reliability of our health benefits platform, making a tangible difference for small businesses and their employees.
• • You will report directly to our Chief Product Officer, collaborating closely on product strategy, roadmap development, and prioritization. This close alignment ensures that technical decisions are deeply integrated with business objectives, allowing us to move swiftly and effectively. If you are passionate about building systems that are not only functional but also elegant and reliable, and you thrive in a dynamic startup environment, you will find yourself a perfect fit within our growing team.
• • **Key Responsibilities and Impact:**
• • **Architect Core Application Framework:** Design and implement a scalable, maintainable, and robust core application framework that will serve as the backbone of Meridio's platform. This includes making critical decisions about technology stacks, architectural patterns, and data models to support future growth and feature development.
• • **Design Seamless Interaction Models:** Develop intuitive and user-friendly interaction models for both B2B administrators managing benefits and B2C employees accessing them. The goal is to create a unified experience where the complexities of health benefits are abstracted away, making them easy to understand and manage.
• • **Build Foundational Utilities:** Create and deploy essential utilities that empower our platform, enabling features for user onboarding, benefit enrollment, claims processing, and communication. These utilities will be the building blocks for all subsequent product development.
• • **Drive Engagement and Depth:** Anchor user engagement by designing features and workflows that allow users to explore and utilize the platform's capabilities more deeply without feeling overwhelmed or forced. This involves understanding user journeys and anticipating their needs.
• • **Iterate Based on User Feedback:** Actively observe real users interacting with the product, gather feedback through various channels, and translate these insights into actionable improvements. This continuous feedback loop is crucial for refining the user experience and ensuring product-market fit.
• • **Leverage Third-Party Integrations:** Strategically integrate with third-party services and APIs (e.g., payroll providers, insurance carriers, HRIS systems) to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, and enhance the overall value proposition of our platform.
• • **Collaborate on Product Strategy:** Partner closely with the Product team on defining the product roadmap, scoping new features, and prioritizing development efforts. Your technical expertise will be vital in assessing feasibility, estimating effort, and identifying potential challenges.
• • **Ensure System Reliability and Scalability:** Own the architecture and reliability of our core systems as we scale. This includes implementing monitoring, alerting, and performance optimization strategies to ensure zero downtime and meet key Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• • **Champion Technical Excellence:** Promote best practices in software development, including clean code, thorough testing, and effective code reviews, fostering a culture of quality and continuous improvement within the engineering team.
• • **Communicate Effectively:** Share technical updates, progress, and challenges early and often with the team and stakeholders, ensuring transparency and alignment across the organization.
• • **What Success Looks Like (First 12 Months):**
• • Both core B2B and B2C utilities are live and actively used by thousands of monthly active users, demonstrating successful product adoption and market validation.
• • A significant reduction in support tickets related to core functionalities, indicating a stable and intuitive user experience.
• • Zero downtime experienced during critical periods, such as open enrollment, showcasing the reliability and resilience of the platform.
• • Features are consistently shipped in days rather than weeks, reflecting an agile development process and efficient engineering practices.
• • Key SLAs for performance, reliability, and latency are consistently met, with no critical regressions introduced during releases, ensuring a high-quality user experience.
• • This role is ideal for an engineer who thinks holistically about systems, prioritizes clean and maintainable code, believes in the power of simple solutions, and knows the strategic importance of balancing build versus buy decisions. You can articulate complex technical concepts in plain language and thrive in fast-paced, distributed team environments, always balancing technical excellence with empathy for the end-user.