Spark Team Engineer
Summary
Builds short-term AI proofs of concept and data pipelines to validate new healthcare products, working solo with non-technical teams to decide whether to advance, return, or kill each idea.
Who we are: At Arkana Laboratories, everyone has an important role to fill. Come join us and be a part of a team dedicated to making life better for those who need it most.
This place is packed with super-smart people who do their best work together. We work hard every day to advance our understanding of disease and provide world-class care to our patients in hopes of leaving our corner of the world a little better than we found it. While we are committed to improving the lives of thousands of patients, we never lose sight of the realization that they are the reason we get to create change in our field.
Built on generosity, teamwork, and the freedom to try new things, we take great pride in our work. Great ideas come from everywhere in this company and we celebrate each success and failure for the opportunity it gives us to keep reaching. For more than twenty years after our founder, Dr. Patrick Walker, wrote his goals on the back of a napkin, our people, culture, and values have remained strong.
About this position: As the Spark Team Engineer, you will be the technical half of SPARK, Arkana’s two-person embedded unit that owns the front of our AI-native development funnel. You will build the proofs of concept that decide what Arkana makes next, real enough that the answer is trustworthy and fast enough that the answer arrives in weeks, and you will do the data work most of those answers turn on. This is deliberately a hands-on individual contributor role: there is no team to delegate to, and it stays that way by design. Working alongside the Spark Team Product Manager on focused 2-to-4-week engagements across departments, you will help close every engagement with a documented decision: advance, return, or kill. Engagements are short and embedded, so you will need to interface well with people you just met, work alongside non-technical builders with patience and without condescension, and capture how a department actually operates in days, not weeks. Seniority is dictated by the candidate: the mandate is fixed, and the level, scope, and expectations that come with it are calibrated to the person who takes it.
PoC & Data Engineering:
- Build timeboxed proofs of concept designed to answer a specific business question
- Prepare Advanced concepts for handoff to the standardized deploy pipeline
- Own the data layer of every engagement: find and assess source data, build the pipelines and models a POC needs, and judge early whether the data can support the idea at all
Discovery & Engagement:
- Share the discovery work: sit with end users, absorb departmental process knowledge quickly, and turn what you hear into technical shape
- Assess feasibility, integration surface, and PHI/data boundaries during idea vetting
- Evaluate existing vibe-coded applications and/or problem statements during engagement zero and advance/return/kill triage
- Set the technical guardrails (data boundaries, access, non-goals) attached to Return decisions
- Document decisions and transfer knowledge at every engagement close
- Other duties as assigned
Communication & Collaboration:
- Genuine skill with non-engineers: draws out process knowledge patiently, explains technical findings without translation loss
- Patience and care working alongside non-technical builders
- Self-directed, comfortable without heavy process or oversight
You should have:
Required Experience:
- Experience spanning data engineering and full-stack software work; the balance should lean data (pipelines, modeling, integration across messy source systems) with production application work behind it
- Demonstrated judgment with prototypes: ones you took to production, and ones you killed along the way; expect to walk through both
- Experience in regulated environments, or the judgment to operate in one from day one
Required Technical Skills:
- Strong SQL and PostgreSQL
- Comfortable in Node.js and modern web stacks; able to pick up unfamiliar codebases quickly
- Cloud infrastructure experience (Azure/AWS/GCP)
- Hands-on fluency with AI-assisted development workflows (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode); able to meet vibe-coding departments where they are
What we offer: We know that health is more than doctor visits and life is more than work. We work hard at Arkana but in turn provide competitive salaries and generous benefit offerings.
Specifically, we offer the following benefits to full-time employees:
- Competitive salary
- Generous paid time off and Paid Holidays
- Minimal cost health insurance for you and affordable options for your family
- 401(k) with immediate eligibility and match
- Company-paid life insurance
- Company-paid long term disability coverage
- Affordable vision and dental plans
- Flexible Spending Account or Health Savings Account availability
- Wellness plan and complimentary yoga classes
- Monthly in-office massages and employer-sponsored lunches
Please see Careers for further information.