Chief Technical Officer - Founding Team

Iris AI
Dallas, TX

Founding CTO / AI Engineer — Therapod AI
About Therapod AI

Therapod AI is building a new category: AI-powered mental wellness delivered through physical pods + real-time AI experiences.

Think:

  • AI video wellness coach-style conversations (voice + avatar)
  • Beautiful, private pods in universities, hospitals, corporate campuses
  • Real-world infrastructure powered by cutting-edge AI

We already have live deployments, real users, and strong inbound from enterprise partners.

We’re early, moving fast, and this is a chance to help define an entirely new category.

The Role

We’re looking for a founding CTO / cracked AI engineer to build this with us.

This is not a “manage a team and go to meetings” role.

This is:

  • You shipping product daily
  • You owning the entire stack
  • You turning ideas into live experiences in hours, not weeks

Important:

  • This is a founding team role
  • Equity-only for now while we raise our seed round
  • Massive ownership + upside

If you want comfort, this isn’t it.

If you want to build something that actually matters and moves fast, it is.

What You’ll Actually Do
  • Build and ship the core Therapod experience:
  • AI conversations (voice + text + avatar)
  • Real-time streaming + low latency systems
  • Mobile app + web + in-pod interface
  • Own the backend (APIs, infra, data, auth, everything)
  • Integrate AI models (OpenAI, Gemini, etc.) and make them feel magical
  • Optimize latency, cost, and reliability like crazy
  • Make hardware + software actually work together in the real world
  • Deploy updates to pods in the field without breaking anything
  • Rapidly prototype → test → iterate with real users

You’ll go from:

idea → shipped → used by real people …constantly.

What We’re Looking For
  • You are fast — like actually fast
  • You ship more in a week than most teams do in a month
  • You use AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, GPT, etc.) as a multiplier
  • You’re comfortable owning everything:
  • frontend
  • backend
  • infra
  • AI integrations
  • You’ve built real things (not just tutorials)
  • You don’t need permission — you just build
  • You care about product quality and user experience

Bonus if:

  • You’ve worked on real-time systems (voice, streaming, WebRTC)
  • You’ve built with LLMs / AI agents
  • You’ve hacked on hardware or weird edge environments
What This Is Like
  • Early-stage chaos (in a good way)
  • Very high ownership
  • Very high expectations
  • Very fast iteration cycles
  • Direct line to founder + real users
Why This Is Interesting
  • You’re building something people physically walk into and use
  • Not just another SaaS dashboard
  • You get to define:
  • AI + mental health UX
  • real-time human + AI interaction
  • hardware + software experiences
  • Already seeing real demand from universities, healthcare, and enterprise


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