Senior Backend Engineer

Job description

Senior Backend Engineer (Python) needed to design and build the services that power a healthcare company enabling remote patient monitoring, clinical research, and personalized healthcare. You'll own Python services and REST APIs end to end — from discovery through to production — model and evolve the data behind them, and make foundational architectural decisions for a next-generation platform where scalability, security, and privacy are non-negotiable. You'll partner closely with frontend, mobile, clinical, and data teammates, set the technical bar for backend code and reliability, and mentor more junior engineers. This is a hands-on senior role for a backend engineer who leads non-trivial work independently and brings strong engineering judgement to a fast-paced, distributed environment.

What You'll Do:

- Drive foundational architectural decisions for our next-generation platform, ensuring scalability, security, and maintainability

- Design, build, and maintain Python services that expose well-documented, versioned REST APIs

- Model and evolve data with PostgreSQL (and NoSQL where appropriate), including schema migrations and query performance tuning

- Integrate with internal services and third-party systems (auth, payments, healthcare data sources) with clear contracts and graceful failure modes

- Design services with security and privacy by default, aligned with global healthcare compliance standards

- Write thorough automated tests at unit, integration, and contract levels using pytest

- Add the logging, metrics, and tracing needed to operate services confidently in production

- Participate in on-call and incident response for owned services, and drive blameless post-mortems and follow-ups

- Review code with care, pushing for clarity, simplicity, and good test coverage

- Use AI-assisted development tools effectively to accelerate delivery without compromising quality

- Document architecture decisions, runbooks, and API contracts so distributed teammates can pick work up easily

- Partner with product, design, and clinical stakeholders to scope features and trade-offs

- Mentor more junior backend engineers and help raise the bar on backend practices across teams

What We're Looking For:

- 3+ years of professional backend engineering experience shipping production services

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience

- Strong, hands-on Python skills, including modern type hints, async patterns, and idiomatic project layout

- Production experience with at least one major Python web framework (FastAPI, Django, or Flask)

- A proven track record designing, building, and evolving REST APIs (OpenAPI / Swagger), with familiarity with API versioning, pagination, and error-handling conventions

- Solid SQL skills with PostgreSQL or MySQL — comfortable writing migrations and tuning queries

- Strong testing habits with pytest across unit, integration, and contract tests

- Confident with Git, code review, and trunk-based or short-lived-branch workflows

- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with attention to long-term maintainability

- An ownership mindset — you take features from idea to production and stay accountable after launch

- Clear written and verbal communication in English, with the ability to work asynchronously across time zones

- Pragmatism: you balance correctness, speed, and complexity appropriately for the stage of the product

Nice to Have:

- Experience working in regulated environments (HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, or medical-device software)

- Working knowledge of event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, Pub/Sub)

- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

- Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)

- Exposure to observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana, Sentry)

- Hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools to accelerate delivery

- Background in healthcare, life sciences, or another data-sensitive domain

- Experience with FHIR, HL7, or other healthcare interoperability standards

- Performance work on high-throughput or low-latency systems

- Hands-on experience deploying services to AWS, GCP, or Azure, and shipping changes through a CI/CD pipeline

What Success Looks Like:

- Demonstrated agency — you proactively identify technical gaps, architectural bottlenecks, or product opportunities and independently drive solutions to completion

- Reliable, well-tested services with healthy uptime and clear SLOs for the surfaces you own

- Predictable delivery: features shipped within agreed scope and timelines

- Strong code review and design contributions across the wider engineering team

- Growth and effectiveness of the more junior engineers you mentor

- Healthy incident response — time to detect, mitigate, and follow up on production issues