Founding Engineer

Senior Full-Stack Engineer — Agentic AI & Data
Location: India / United States
Experience: 5+ years
Core Stack: Python, TypeScript/React, SQL
About Orcana
Orcana is building the decision intelligence layer for life sciences.
Pharma companies have enormous amounts of claims, prescription, patient journey, engagement, and commercial data — yet answering an important new business question can still take days or weeks and involve multiple analysts, data scientists, and consultants.
We’re changing that.
Orcana combines agentic AI with rigorous analytics to help teams reason across complex datasets, investigate problems, run analyses, measure causal impact, and turn data into decisions.
We’ve bootstrapped Orcana from an idea into an enterprise-grade product already being used on real commercial problems in life sciences. We’re a very lean team with high revenue per user, growing customer demand, and are now building out the engineering team for our next phase.
The Role
We’re looking for an exceptional engineer who wants to work at the intersection of agentic AI, data systems, and enterprise software.
This is not a role where you own one narrow layer of the stack — and it is definitely not about wrapping an LLM in a chat interface.
You’ll work across the product, with particular focus on the intelligence layer that powers Orcana:
Production AI agents and multi-agent systems
Tool use, subagents, context, and memory
Long-running and stateful agent workflows
Evaluation, observability, and reliability
Deterministic analytical and data-science workflows
Data infrastructure and APIs
Product experiences for interacting with complex analytical systems
You’ll take problems from data → backend → agents → product → production.
What We’re Looking For
5+ years of strong software engineering experience
Excellent Python and strong backend engineering fundamentals
Strong TypeScript / React experience
Strong SQL and ability to work comfortably with large, complex datasets
Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM or agentic AI systems into production
Strong understanding of APIs, distributed systems, databases, and cloud infrastructure
Ability to independently own ambiguous problems from idea through production
High product intuition — you care about what users experience, not just whether the code works
What Makes Someone Exceptional Here
You’ll probably thrive at Orcana if you:
Have unusually high agency and don't need problems broken down for you
Enjoy moving across the stack instead of staying within a narrow specialization
Care deeply about engineering quality while still shipping quickly
Are excited by hard problems where LLM flexibility needs to coexist with deterministic, trustworthy systems
Want your work to have a visible impact on the product, customers, and direction of the company
Why Orcana
Hard technical problems.
We’re building AI systems that must reason over real enterprise data and produce outputs customers can actually trust.
Real customer usage.
Our platform is already being used by life sciences teams on datasets spanning millions of patients and billions of healthcare records.
Extremely high ownership.
We’re a super lean team. You’ll own meaningful pieces of the architecture and work directly with the founders and customers.
Strong upside.
We offer highly competitive compensation and meaningful equity. You’ll be joining early enough to materially influence both the product and the company as we scale.
A chance to build the category.
We believe the next generation of enterprise software won’t just surface information — it will reason, analyze, and help people make decisions. We’re building that future for Pharma.
Interested?
If you want to build difficult AI systems, work with an exceptionally high degree of ownership, and join a company at an inflection point, we’d love to hear from you.

Work arrangement
No