About the role

Role overview

Founding Engineer / Head of Technology (m/w/d) at NHN, a new non-profit building the first nationwide digital register for cardiovascular treatments. You join at the stage where processes, culture, and how the team works are still being shaped.

Responsibilities

Build NHN’s technical platform and recruit/lead the tech team.
Develop the data platform, including backend and frontend.
Build AI-supported extraction pipelines to turn unstructured clinical documents into structured medical data, including:
- OCR
- NLP
- modern language models
- validation and approval by medical personnel
Drive pipeline quality, as it determines overall project success.
Ensure interoperability using standards such as:
- FHIR
- HL7
- IHE
Embed privacy, security, and compliance from day one:
- Privacy by Design
- pseudonymization via an independent trustee entity
- preparation for ISO 27001
Work closely with the Head of Legal on regulatory responsibilities.
Make pragmatic technology choices focused on robustness, auditability, and delivery speed.
Build the team progressively (first engineers and ML engineers, then structure behind them).
Engage external partners where they accelerate delivery—without giving up core components.

Requirements

Designed and scaled complex data platforms, ideally in healthcare or another heavily regulated environment (e.g., FinTech or Cybersecurity).
Strong hands-on background, including:
- cloud-native software development
- modern web technologies
- ML development and MLOps, up to fine-tuning large transformer models
Experience building from scratch without an existing platform and/or large team.
Ability to connect technical vision with pragmatic execution and deliver an early working roadmap.
Experience building agile teams.

Nice to have

Familiarity with interoperability standards and medical terminologies.

Collaboration/Domain

Medical domain expertise is provided by the in-house medical team; you integrate it into engineering workflows (e.g., pipeline approval).

About Nationales Herz-Netz (NHN) / Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kardiologie e. V.

Nationales Herz-Netz (NHN) is a newly founded non-profit organization (gGmbH) based in Düsseldorf and a 100% subsidiary of the German Cardiology Society (DGK). Its mission is to close the documentation and data-exchange gap in cardiovascular care by building the first nationwide digital register for cardiovascular treatments, leveraging AI and clinical expertise. The platform enables real-world insights into therapy effectiveness to improve care quality and outcomes for patients.

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