Founding Senior AI Engineer (Equity-Only / Part-Time) — RAG, Conversational AI & Agentic Systems

This isn't a job. It's a mission. One billion people are struggling with their mental health. 700,000 preventable deaths each year. Only a fraction ever reach the right provider because borders, languages, and broken marketplaces stand in the way.

Unacceptable. We're fixing it.

Really Global is building the world's first truly global, provider-centric mental health marketplace — so anyone, anywhere, can find the right human in their language, at a price they can afford. We're already live at really.global in 200+ countries. The foundation exists. Now we layer in the intelligence that makes finding the right provider feel like talking to a wise friend — not filling out a form.

The Opportunity: Own the AI Layer of a Global Mental Health Marketplace

This is pure sweat equity for a senior AI engineer who builds — not manages, not advises, not architects from a whiteboard. You write the code, you ship the system, you debug it in production. If your last hands-on commit was more than a month ago, this isn't the right fit. If you're still in the code every day and want meaningful ownership in a global platform alongside your primary role, keep reading. Typical commitment: 5–8 hours/week, equity-only.

You'll own the architecture and the builds — from retrieval systems to real-time conversational matching to the agentic tools our providers will use to care for their clients at scale.

Most AI roles hand you a narrow feature inside someone else's platform. This one hands you the entire AI surface of a company. You will be building this yourself — this is not a role where you define requirements and hand them to a team.

We're backed by founders with a track record of scaling ventures to $130M+ in revenue. This will be the most meaningful AI work of your career.

Who You Are (and how you show up)

• You've shipped AI in production, at a real company, to real users. Not demos. Not notebooks. Not side experiments." with: "You are hands-on-keyboard, today. Not five years ago. Not through a team you manage. You are personally writing Python, building retrieval pipelines, debugging embedding quality, and shipping LLM-powered features in production right now. If your day-to-day is meetings, roadmaps, and managing engineers — this isn't your role.
• You have production experience in at least two of these areas: retrieval systems / semantic search / RAG; real-time conversational AI (voice or text) with LLM orchestration; agentic systems with tool use and structured outputs. You're hungry to grow into the third.
• You take AI in healthcare seriously. You understand that a chatbot helping someone in crisis find a provider is not the same as a chatbot helping someone return a sweater. Hallucination, tone, safety, and escalation are live concerns — not afterthoughts.
• You're an engineer, not a manager. You might have "Senior" or "Staff" in your title, but your hands are in the code. You don't delegate the hard problems — you solve them.
• Pragmatic, not perfect. You know when to fine-tune, when to prompt, when to use a bigger model, and when to ship the dumb version that works. You default to evaluation-driven development because vibes don't scale.
• Clear, candid communicator. You can explain model trade-offs to non-technical founders, and give direct feedback to engineers shipping AI features that aren't production-ready.
• AI-native workflow. You orchestrate your own work with tools like Claude or Codex — not because it's trendy, but because anything else is slower.

What You'll Build (and why it matters)

This is the roadmap. All of it needs to work in production, for real people, in a healthcare context where hallucinations and bad recommendations have real consequences.

• Semantic search and discovery — help someone describe what they're struggling with in natural language and surface the right providers across languages, specialties, price points, and modalities. RAG done properly: embeddings, reranking, evaluation, and the hard work of measuring whether results are actually better than keyword search.
• Conversational matching and support — real-time conversational AI that handles customer support at scale and acts as a guided matching experience, talking a user through their needs and surfacing the right provider in the right language, in the moment. Latency, cost, safety, and escalation-to-human are all first-order problems here.
• Provider-side agents — personalized client engagement, homework assignments, structured surveys, intake summaries, progress dashboards, session prep. Give every provider on the platform leverage they've never had — without replacing the human relationship that makes therapy work.
• Real-time audio translation, longitudinal client insights, outcome measurement, and whatever comes next. The AI surface of a global mental health marketplace is vast and largely unwritten. You'll help shape it.

Our stack: Next.js/React (frontend); Python services (backend); PostgreSQL; hosted on Azure; Cloudflare at the edge. Model layer and vector/retrieval stack are yours to shape.

The Deal: Transparent Equity Partnership

• Points-for-outcomes system. We measure contribution in Story Points, a standard unit of complexity, not hours. This rewards your efficiency and impact.
• Merit-based ownership. Contribution translates directly to equity from a dedicated 5% contributor pool. Your stake grows with every outcome you ship.
• All work is valued. You earn points not just for new features, but also for evaluation infrastructure, safety work, documentation, and incident response.
• Real shipped value. Ownership accrues only when your work is reviewed and approved by a designated Reviewer of Record (never the author).
• Clear commitment & vesting. We use a 6-month active contribution cliff with a minimum monthly point threshold to ensure we're a great fit. After the cliff, your grant vests over a 3-year period.
• Quarterly transparency. We publish a rollup each quarter showing your total points, rate, and accrued percentage — you always know exactly where you stand.
• Locked-in stake. When we close our first priced funding round, the program freezes and everyone's earned percentage becomes a fixed part of our cap table.
• No hours theater. No politics. Value in production = ownership. All details are codified in a formal, transparent agreement covering vesting, IP, and security.

Why This Will Define Your Career

• Total AI surface ownership. Very few roles let one person own retrieval, conversational AI, and agentic systems for a global platform. This is one of them.
• Meaningful stakes. Your work directly affects whether someone in crisis finds the right person to help them. That's a rare kind of weight to build under — and a rare kind of signal for every future role you take.
• Global scale from day one. 200+ countries. Dozens of languages. Healthcare compliance. The complexity is the perk.
• Zero waste. We lean hard on AI tools (Claude/Codex) to remove boilerplate so you can focus on the model layer, the eval layer, and the hard product decisions.

Are You the One?

This is a side project. We know that. You have a day job, a life, obligations. We respect all of it.

What makes this work is consistency. Not every week looks the same — some weeks are 3 hours, some are 10. That's fine. What matters is that you stay engaged, stay communicative, and keep moving things forward.

We use a 6-month cliff with a minimum monthly point threshold. If a month falls short, it simply doesn't count toward your cliff. During the six-month cliff period, if you stop contributing, we part ways respectfully — no drama, but no equity either. After the cliff, you vest monthly and always keep what you've earned.

The people who thrive here are the ones who want a side project — who get energy from building something meaningful outside their 9-to-5. They're drawn to the idea of owning the AI layer of a global platform, shipping real production systems, and getting in on the ground floor of something that could change how a billion people access mental health care.

If that sounds like extra work, this isn't for you. If that sounds like the thing you've been looking for, APPLY NOW.