Founding Tech Lead (Dual Use Defence & Health-tech) - Tricorder

• health-tech, medical devices, defence, or a comparable safety-critical field, and comfort with the standards and evidence that come with it (e.g. clinical safety, data protection, medical-device / quality management frameworks).
• Pragmatism and speed at the earliest stage: you make good build-vs-buy calls, ship, and are comfortable with ambiguity and imperfect information.
• Founder wiring: you want ownership and equity, you can carry the technical story with clinical users and investors, and you can hire and raise the bar without slowing everyone down.
• A reason to care: something you've seen, built or lived that makes this problem feel important and solvable to you.

We're looking for a rare combination: someone who can build hardware and regulated software together, and who wants to do it as a founder rather than an employee.

Strong candidates will bring most of the following:

• A track record of shipping real products, ideally spanning both physical devices and the software that runs on and around them. You’ve taken something from prototype to something people actually use, not just research or internal demos.
• Depth in one or more of: embedded systems / firmware, sensors and signal acquisition, edge compute, or connected-device architecture.
• Advanced knowledge of AI/ML for on-device inference or sensor fusion.
• Experience as a founding engineer or early employee at a technology startup.
• Exposure to clinical, pre-hospital, emergency, humanitarian or field-operations environments.
• Familiarity with the realities of getting hardware manufactured and certified.
• Pre-existing security clearance with UKSV

Probably not the right fit if

• Your experience is mostly software-only, or mostly hardware-only, and you're not excited to work across the seam of the two.
• You've worked mainly inside large organisations with mature processes and large teams, and need that structure to be effective.
• You want to design the perfect architecture before understanding the users, the constraints and the regulatory path.
• You're looking for a senior IC or corporate CTO title rather than a genuine co-founder role at pre-seed pace.

Why build with Founders Factory

Founders Factory provides structured support through a dedicated studio team specializing in product, design, and growth. This role offers co-founder equity and a stipend during the six-month build phase, positioning the CTO for a long-term leadership role in the resulting company.