CTO/Technical Partner to CEO

About Us

Pink Elephant builds infrastructure of products at the frontier of mental health on EU and US markets.

Mental health is a global crisis hiding in plain sight. Nearly 1 in 8 people live with a mental disorder. Depression and anxiety alone strip $1 trillion from the global economy every year. Conventional treatment leaves most patients cycling through mediocre solutions for years: undertreated, undersupported, and underinformed. Progressive therapies are showing results up to 10 times more effective than standard care. Yet fewer than 5% of people can access them.

We're here to close that gap.

A big part of our portfolio is everyday mental healthcare: mental health diagnostics, antidepressant journeys, alcohol use disorder, medical cannabis, the unmet clinical touchpoints, the patients who leave a 20-minute appointment with a prescription and no roadmap.

We don't build one product. We launch a new live product loop every 2-3 months. You will not join one product. You will join a portfolio and a queue of ideas behind it:

• withClaro.com - an AI mental health product supporting people taking antidepressants, with live users. The next step is a UK telemedicine loop: consultation, prescription, pharmacy, delivery, and a code back into the app.
• Alcohol-Use Disorder (AUD) UK - a clone of the Claro loop for alcohol use disorder, built on the same core.
• Medical cannabis - a portal and interface for partner clinics in Germany and the UK.
• PsyAccess - a directory with organic traffic.

Every loop runs in a regulated environment with real partners: doctors, pharmacies, CQC-registered clinics, e-prescribing and verification vendors. The key question is: how do we assemble it fast and keep it legal, safe and accessible.

The Role

We are looking for a technical partner who assembles and launches products with his own hands, side by side with the CEO, and teaches the team to work the same way.

This is not an engineering management role. You will not run a dev team, write specs for developers, or design a platform for the next three years. You will build: landing, intake, payment, vendor integration, deployment, event analytics. Product decisions are made together with the CEO and the CPO.

Why ex-CTO rather than a strong developer: we want someone who has already been through architecture, teams, and processes, and has concluded that in today's world of ready-made services and AI tooling one strong person ships in 4-6 weeks what used to take a team of five. Not someone who grew into a CTO, but someone who outgrew it and came back to building on purpose.

You will report to the CEO. The CPO joins the second interview and works with you on products.

Responsibilities: What You Drive

• Assemble and launch product loops end to end: landing, intake, payment, vendor integration, deployment, event tracking.
• Write and ship code every day using AI development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, v0 or similar) and ready-made platforms.
• Choose "buy and tweak" over "write from scratch": clinical platform, e-prescribing, identity verification, Stripe. Your own code is the glue, the intake, and the tracking.
• Sit with the founder, a partner doctor, a pharmacy, a vendor, and turn the conversation into a working flow.
• Keep every loop legal in a regulated environment: UK and DE clinical, prescribing, and data rules.
• Move the portfolio's product managers to the owner mode empowering them to push to prod themselves: tools, templates, access, weekly reviews.
• Make product decisions together with the CEO; decisions take a day, not a committee.

First 90 Days

1. withClaro.com UK telemedicine loop: consultation, prescription, pharmacy, delivery, code into the app. Rented services, your hands only on the glue, intake, and tracking. Goal: first live consultation with a prescription in 6-8 weeks.
2. Alcohol-Use Disorder UK: clone the Claro loop for alcohol use disorder on the same core, plus 3-4 weeks.
3. Medical cannabis: set up the portal and interface for partner clinics in Germany and the UK.
4. In parallel: product managers across the portfolio building and shipping on their own.

Experience: What You Bring

• 3+ years as CTO, Head of Engineering, or technical co-founder, at a startup or a unit inside a large company.
• You write code yourself today. Github commits from the last 30 days you can show.
• AI development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, v0, Replit or similar) are your primary workflow, not an experiment.
• At least one product you built alone or with one partner and took to real users or payments in the last 2 years: a side business, a pet project, an MVP for someone.
• A track record of buying ready-made and tweaking: you can name which services you took off the shelf, which you threw out, and why.
• You work with business directly: founder, partner doctor, pharmacy. You translate the conversation into a working flow.
• Working English: partners and vendors are in the UK and Germany. Russian is a plus, the team is Russian-speaking.

Nice to Have

• Experience in healthtech, telemedicine, mental health, or other regulated consumer products in Europe.
• Hands-on work with clinical platforms, e-prescribing, pharmacy integration, or identity verification vendors.
• Experience taking products from zero to one more than once.
• Public building track record: live GitHub, build-in-public posts on LinkedIn, X, or Telegram.
• A startup where you were CTO that was sold or closed in 2022-2025, after which you did not take the same title in a corporation.

What This Role Is Not

• A current CTO who is open to considering. You would come to build a team and a platform. We have neither to offer.
• An architect or manager who stopped writing code 3+ years ago and never came back.
• Someone who needs 2-3 engineers to get started.
• A full-time freelancer with a dozen clients. We need one focus.

Perks: Why Join Us

• Purpose and stability without corporate routine. The job is building products with your hands, not reports and meetings. For someone who left a CTO seat to go independent and is tired of the instability, this is a rare combination.
• Several launches a year, not one. Claro, AUD UK, medical cannabis DE/UK, PsyAccess, and a queue of ideas behind them. A new live loop every 2-3 months.
• A regulated environment with real partners: doctors, pharmacies, CQC clinics. The interesting problem is how to assemble fast and stay legal, not another SaaS dashboard.
• Direct work with the CEO/Cofounder.
• Equity/ESOP after the successful probation period.

Originally posted on Himalayas