Software Engineer

About Ocean Friends

use technology to give every child with special needs a greater sense of purpose, progress, and joy.

We build tools that help therapists, parents, and care teams work together effortlessly—so more time goes to the child, not paperwork.

Role Overview

Software Engineer (AI & Business Systems)

You will:

• Build AI-powered agents, copilots, and automation workflows used daily by therapists and families
• Stay on the cutting edge of the AI ecosystem (agents, RAG, speech models, multimodal, reasoning engines)
• Translate business problems into elegant systems and intelligent tools
• Work deeply with founders, users, and therapy centers to understand what actually moves the needle
• Develop robust, scalable backend services (Python + GCP preferred) that power our core platform

Business understanding is nearly more important than pure technical skill.

Your superpower should be connecting therapy workflows, parent journeys, and business needs to AI capabilities.

What You’ll Do

AI & Product

• Build and maintain AI agents for scheduling, claims, parent journaling, therapist documentation, and more
• Evaluate, experiment, and integrate new AI models and tools quickly
• Design systems that combine deterministic rules with LLM reasoning
• Create delightful experiences for therapists, parents, and admin teams

Engineering

• Develop scalable microservices on GCP (Cloud Run, Firestore, BigQuery, Pub/Sub)
• Write clean, maintainable Python or TypeScript code
• Work with structured/unstructured data, PDFs, audio, and multimodal features
• Build APIs, automation pipelines, and real-time event systems

Business & Domain Understanding

• Work closely with founders and customers to understand therapy workflows
• Translate customer needs into product features
• Use empathy and curiosity to understand how your work impacts children, parents, and therapists
• Make product decisions that balance business value, ROI, usability, and technical feasibility

Who You Are

Human-centric

• Mission-driven—excited about helping kids and families
• Empathetic and comfortable talking to non-technical users
• Curious about therapy, parent journeys, and clinic operations

AI-native

• Strong understanding of the AI agent ecosystem
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, vector search, multimodal inputs, or agent frameworks
• Comfortable evaluating multiple models and picking the right tool for the job
• Stays current with the rapidly evolving AI landscape

Product + Business minded

• Understands how product decisions affect revenue, workflows, and outcomes
• Thinks in terms of ROI, effort-vs-impact, and user happiness
• Thrives in ambiguity and can define the problem before solving it

Technical skills

• Strong Python or TypeScript/Node
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferred)
• Understanding of basic ML/AI concepts (RAG, embeddings, model evaluation, prompting)
• Ability to ship quickly and iterate

Nice to Have

• Experience in healthcare, education, or therapy tech
• UI/UX empathy and ability to design intuitive workflows
• Experience with FastAPI, React, or BigQuery
• Familiarity with HIPAA and secure data handling

Why Ocean Friends

• Mission-driven team improving lives of children every day
• Work directly with founders—zero bureaucracy
• Modern tech stack and an environment that embraces AI deeply
• Huge ownership over product direction and outcomes
• A profitable, growing company where your work has immediate real-world impact