Principal Backend Engineer

The role

You will shape the technical direction and architecture of a generative AI healthcare SaaS platform. You will lead the design of backend systems, solve complex technical challenges, and mentor engineers.

What you will do

• Define and drive long-term technical direction for core backend systems and services.
• Lead complex engineering initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Design, implement, and review critical components of backend infrastructure.
• Architect resilient distributed systems, APIs, data services, and asynchronous workflows.
• Establish engineering practices for system reliability, observability, and performance.
• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers and develop emerging technical leaders.
• Collaborate with leadership to evaluate technical investments and manage architectural trade-offs.

Required qualifications

• Track record of architecting, building, and operating complex, large-scale backend or platform systems in production.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, including service architecture, data consistency, concurrency, fault tolerance, scalability, and performance optimization.
• Expert-level proficiency in at least one modern backend programming language.
• Ability and willingness to work extensively in Python.
• Strong experience designing and operating cloud-native applications on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Understanding of infrastructure automation, deployment practices, and production operations.
• Deep understanding of API design, data modeling, databases, asynchronous processing, and modern backend architectural patterns.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and translate complex requirements into scalable engineering solutions.
• Ability to improve engineering effectiveness through architectural simplification, reusable systems, mentorship, and technical standards.
• Ability to work on-site in Palo Alto office three days per week.

Nice to have

• Experience designing, building, or operating production generative AI applications, LLM-powered workflows, or AI infrastructure.
• Experience building multi-tenant enterprise SaaS platforms with strong requirements for security, isolation, scalability, and availability.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern monitoring and observability tooling.
• Experience building systems in regulated environments, including healthcare, financial services, or other industries with stringent data privacy and security requirements.
• Familiarity with HIPAA, SOC 2, or comparable security and compliance frameworks.
• Experience establishing technical foundations, engineering standards, and architectural direction in rapidly growing organizations.

Benefits

• Competitive salaries with equity packages
• Medical/dental/vision insurance
• Flexible working hours
• Hybrid work options

About the company

Qualified Health is redefining what is possible with Generative AI in healthcare. The company provides infrastructure for safe AI governance, healthcare-specific agent creation, and real-time algorithm monitoring.