Senior Product Engineer

About Malla

Malla is building the Shopify for next-gen health practitioners.

We started by operating our own functional medicine clinic and built much of the software we wished existed ourselves. Today, Malla serves close to 1k practitioners across our products, helping them run and grow their practices across care, commerce, and AI.

We’re still a very small team, and we’re entering a new chapter of the company. The next few years will be about giving independent practitioners the same tools that have historically only been available to venture-backed digital health companies, and helping them run and grow their practices with AI coworkers.

The role

You’ll own problems from the moment they’re still fuzzy through shipping the solution and learning from what happens.

That might mean talking directly with practitioners, figuring out what’s actually broken in their business, deciding whether the problem is worth solving, thinking through the business model, product design, and architecture, building the product, and getting it into customers’ hands.

In practice, you will:

• Own major products and problems from first principles through launch and iteration.
• Talk directly with customers and develop a deep understanding of how practitioners actually work.
• Make product decisions, not just technical ones.
• Seriously sweat the design details. This has been a huge edge for us (plus, we love good design a lot). We want someone who cares about interaction details, has strong taste, and can turn a rough idea into something that feels genuinely great to use.
• Move comfortably across the stack and make pragmatic architecture decisions without unnecessary complexity.
• Use AI deeply in your day-to-day work and continuously find ways to increase the speed and quality of what you ship.
• Ship a lot. We care about thoughtful work, but we also believe great product teams move very quickly.
• Help shape our engineering culture, standards, and eventually the team around you.
• Do whatever needs to get done. At our size, there is no “someone else” for most problems.

Our tech stack

• Frontend: React, Tailwind, shadcn, NextJS for web, CapacitorJS for mobile apps (in progress)
• Backend: Django, Django REST Framework, Python, Postgres
• Infra: Vercel (frontend), Render (backend), AWS for object storage and identity management
• Development: honcho for simple service orchestration, mise for environment and virtual env management, uv for Python package management, yarn for Javascript package management
• AI and LLMs: A model-agnostic harness, mostly using Claude Code but lately been exploring more with Codex. Devin AI for code review on pull requests
• Supporting tools: Figma, GitHub, Linear, Framer, PostHog

(some of) What we’ve built

• Build Your Own Labs: Think Function Health, but for any practitioner. Practitioners can create their own branded lab panels, choose the biomarkers, set their pricing, and give clients a polished storefront and results experience, while Malla handles the infrastructure behind the scenes.
• Malla AI: An AI copilot that turns fragmented client data into useful clinical and operational context. Automatic pre-appointment prep notes, post-appointment transcript and summary, and a mix of RAG and wiki that makes Malla AI useful for clinical research, lab review, and protocol writing.
• Product design: A simple, intuitive, and fast design that covers a surprising breadth of ground: whitelabeled client portal; scheduling; billing; storefront and offer design; a Notion-like note-taking and protocol-writing workspace; interactive forms and documents; journaling and activity logging; courses and groups; Malla AI threading through the entire product
• Coding with AI: A command-line utility, AI harness, and self-hosted compute setup that has saved us thousands per month on LLM inference costs.

Who we’re looking for

We care much more about how you operate than a specific number of years of experience.

You might be a great fit if:

• You have a strong desire and ability to get better. You learn quickly, seek out feedback, and care a lot about improving your judgment and craft.
• You are obsessed with details. You notice when something feels off in the product, design, code, or customer experience and care enough to fix it.
• You work extremely hard and are relentless when something matters.
• You are high-agency. When something is unclear, your instinct is to figure it out rather than wait for a meeting, process, or perfectly written spec.
• You care deeply about product design. You want the things you build to feel genuinely great, not merely functional.
• You want to understand customers and the business, not just the technical implementation.
• You are comfortable with a lot of autonomy and a lot of uncertainty at the same time.
• You are highly fluent with AI tools and are excited by how much more a small, exceptional team can build because of them.
• You’re low ego and happy to bounce between important architecture decisions, customer conversations, product details, and an annoying bug that simply needs to get fixed.
• You’re excited by functional/holistic/longevity medicine and by the opportunity to give independent practitioners technology that has historically only been available to much larger companies.
• You care more about building a really great, durable business than fancy titles, press, or looking impressive in the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

Experience working within a strong product engineering culture is a plus, but we care much more about your hunger, attitude, and how quickly you learn and improve.

You probably won’t like this role if

• You want a highly structured environment with a clearly defined lane.
• You prefer receiving detailed specs to helping decide what should be built.
• You optimize heavily for predictability, stability, or work-life balance right now.
• You want to specialize narrowly in one layer of the stack.
• You don’t want to spend meaningful time talking with customers, thinking through product design, or understanding the business behind the product.

None of those are bad things. They’re just a mismatch for this particular role.

How we work

We’re remote-first. The best person matters more than the city, although we’d especially love to find someone in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, or San Francisco so there are opportunities to spend meaningful time together in person.

We’re a small team, which means very little bureaucracy and a lot of trust. You will have room to make decisions without asking permission constantly, and you will also be accountable for the outcome of those decisions.

There will be uncertainty. Priorities will change as we learn. Some things will be messy. We expect everyone on the team to communicate directly, move with urgency, and care a lot about the quality of what we put out in the world.

Why this role is unusual

Most engineers are asked to own a feature, a service, or one piece of a roadmap.

This role can become much bigger than that.

For the right person, the opportunity is to become one of the key people responsible for Malla’s product and technical direction as the company enters its next phase. You will inherit a real product, real customers, real revenue, and years of infrastructure, while still having the freedom and scope that normally only exist at the very beginning of a company.

Details

• Location: Remote-first, with a preference for LA, Miami, NYC, or SF.
• Compensation: $150k–$185k base + meaningful equity. We can flex the mix for the right person.
• Title: Senior Product Engineer is the working title. For the right candidate and level, we can flex this.

If you’re interested, send us a note with a little about yourself and why you’re a good fit at morris@malla.co