Lead Backend Platform Engineer

January AI

Lead Backend Platform Engineer developing backend services for health AI startup. Collaborating with teams to optimize APIs and infrastructure for health data solutions in Menlo Park.

Posted 5/1/2026full-timeMenlo Park • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $180,000 - $300,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudDistributed SystemsMicroservicesPostgresTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own backend services that power our app and partner-facing products
Lead design, implementation, and maintenance of APIs, microservices, EHR integration layer and service-to-service workflows
Manage the AI infrastructure that powers our health intelligence and evaluation harness
Improve production reliability, observability, alerting, incident response, and debugging workflows
Drive architectural improvements that simplify service boundaries and reduce operational fragility
Improve the quality, consistency, and maintainability of backend systems across the stack
Partner closely with product, frontend, and AI to deliver robust systems
Help define and enforce strong engineering standards around service design, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational ownership
Step into ambiguous, cross-functional problems and drive them to resolution with minimal oversight

Requirements

What you’ll need

7+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments
Strong experience building and operating backend systems at scale
Deep expertise in backend architecture, distributed systems, and microservices
Excellent written and verbal communication
Strong ownership mentality and the ability to proactively identify and solve problems
Comfort operating as a lead and wearing multiple hats across software, infrastructure, reliability, and cross-functional execution
Strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills
A track record of improving engineering quality, not just delivering features
A high level of care, accountability, and pride in your work
Strong backend development experience in languages relevant to our stack
Experience designing and operating microservices, REST APIs, and event-driven systems
Strong database skills, ideally with PostgreSQL
Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code, especially Terraform
Experience with CI/CD, deployment pipelines, and production operations
Strong experience with monitoring, observability, tracing, logging, and alerting
Experience handling incidents, production debugging, and postmortem-driven improvement
Hands-on experience iterating prompts, retrieval, and evaluation in production
Day-to-day fluency with AI coding tools as part of your normal development loop
Nice to have: Experience in healthcare or health-tech and familiarity with standards and healthcare data models such as FHIR and LOINC
Experience supporting systems used by both internal product teams and external customers or partners

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary and equity packages
401k with corporate matching
Health, dental, vision, life and AD&D insurance
Commuter benefits

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

backend engineeringbackend architecturedistributed systemsmicroservicesREST APIsevent-driven systemsPostgreSQLinfrastructure-as-codeTerraformCI/CD

Soft Skills

communicationownership mentalityproblem-solvingdebuggingroot-cause analysisaccountabilitypride in workcross-functional executionleadershipadaptability