Our AI Startup Client is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to build backend services and APIs in Python. This role has availability in San Francisco and New York City. You will be responsible for designing data models around DynamoDB/Redshift, and working cross-functionally to ship reliable AI-powered features from ideation to production. This role is a highly hands-on, product-focused, and central to how we turn messy real-world claims data into something usable and valuable.
In this role you will build an AI Claims Workbench that helps large insurance organizations tame massive volumes of unstructured medical and claims data. The Senior Backend Engineer will design and build the core AI services that power this platform. You’ll be an early, senior member of the team, shaping how we architect, implement, and scale our backend as we onboard more enterprise customers and expand our product surface area.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs.
- Own core services that power document ingestion, deduplication, summarization, and insights. Sample projects might include building a new claims summarization pipeline or re-architecting our document indexing service for scale and latency.
- Ship features end-to-end with product and design to turn ambiguous requirements into clean, well-factored backend solutions. You’ll write the code, own the schema and data access patterns, and partner with front-end engineers to deliver a polished user experience.
- Work with AI models in production Integrate LLMs, embeddings, and traditional NLP models into robust services—handling orchestration, retries, caching, and safety/guardrails so our AI features are fast and reliable.
- Design data models and pipelines Build and evolve data models across DynamoDB, Redshift, and S3 for high-volume, append-heavy workloads. You’ll help define how we store medical records, timelines, and insights so they’re easy to query, analyze, and audit.
- Improve performance, reliability, and observability Profile hotspots, reduce latency, and harden our services with better metrics, logging, and alerting. You’ll help define SLOs for critical paths and build safeguards so we can move quickly without breaking trust.
- Raise the bar on code quality Lead by example with thoughtful designs, thorough tests, and clear code reviews. You’ll help establish patterns and libraries that make it easier for the rest of the team to build consistent, maintainable services.
- Collaborate across disciplines Work closely with platform engineering, product, operations, and customer-facing teams to understand constraints and tradeoffs. You’ll be a key voice in technical decisions that balance product speed, reliability, security, and compliance.
Requirements:
- BS/MS in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or similar education and experience.
- Seasoned backend experience 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and operating backend systems in production for a SaaS or data-heavy product.
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems & APIs Experience designing and implementing HTTP/JSON APIs, background jobs, event-driven systems, and data-intensive services. You understand failure modes in distributed systems and how to mitigate them.
- Proficiency in our core stack (or similar) Deep experience building backend services in Python, and comfort working with cloud-native architectures on AWS (Lambdas, Fargate, S3, DynamoDB, Redshift or analogous technologies). Familiarity with TypeScript-based frontends or infrastructure (e.g., CDK, modern web frameworks) is a plus, but not required.
- Data modeling and storage expertise Experience designing schemas and access patterns for NoSQL and relational data stores, with an eye toward performance, cost, and simplicity.
- Experience working with AI/ML-powered features You’ve built products leveraging LLMs/ML models before, and are excited about experimenting with new frameworks, tools and novel approaches leveraging SOTA AI.
- Experience designing or implementing authentication and authorization in distributed systems (e.g., JWT, OAuth/OIDC, SSO, role-based or attribute-based access control), and a desire to own our RBAC model and its enforcement in the backend.
- Bias for ownership and iteration You prefer small teams, high autonomy, and tight feedback loops. You’re comfortable making tradeoffs, iterating quickly, and owning services from design through on-call.
- Security, AuthN/AuthZ, and RBAC experience is a bonus.
Salary Range:
- $200K – $250K
- Startup Equity (Stock Options)
Relocation and Visa Requirements:
- Strongly prefer candidates that reside in the San Francisco Bay Area or New York City Area.
- Will provide relocation assistance to the right candidate (that resides in the United States).
- Will transfer H1-B and TN Visas (that resides in the United States/Canada/Mexico).
- All candidates MUST reside in the United States.
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