Senior Backend Engineer

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