Staff Backend Engineer, H1
RWE, Distributed Systems & Data Platform
$170-190k
Plus stock options
Platform connecting healthcare professionals
Be an early applicant
Platform connecting healthcare professionals
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$170-190k
Plus stock options
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To create a healthier future by delivering a platform that connects stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem and encourages purposeful relationships.
Role
Who you are
- You're a Staff-level backend engineer who enjoys solving difficult technical problems at scale
- You thrive in environments where requirements aren't always fully defined and enjoy bringing clarity to ambiguity
- You naturally think in terms of systems, architecture, and long-term scalability while remaining hands-on enough to build production software
- You're excited by the opportunity to work with complex, real-world datasets and are eager to deepen your expertise in large-scale distributed data systems while leveraging your strong backend engineering foundation
- Have a proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives from concept through production
- Bring deep experience designing scalable backend platforms, distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architectures, or infrastructure platforms
- Enjoy solving messy technical problems and making pragmatic architectural tradeoffs
- Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, helping shape direction across teams
- Raise the engineering bar through thoughtful design, high-quality code, and strong technical leadership
- Invest in mentoring teammates and improving engineering practices across the organization
- 8+ years building scalable backend software, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure in production environments
- Strong experience designing scalable, reliable backend architectures and making technical decisions around system design, performance, and maintainability
- Strong programming experience in Python or another modern backend language (Java, Go, Scala, C++, etc.) with the ability to quickly become productive in Python
- Experience building systems that process large volumes of data or high-throughput distributed workloads
- Experience working in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred) and deploying distributed systems in production
- Demonstrated ability to independently lead complex technical initiatives, influence architectural direction, and partner effectively across engineering and product organizations
- Experience with Spark, Kafka, Hudi, Airflow, or other distributed data technologies is a plus—but we're equally interested in backend engineers with strong distributed systems experience who are excited to deepen their expertise in modern data engineering
What the job involves
- At H1, we believe access to the best healthcare information is a basic human right. Our mission is to provide a platform that can optimally inform every doctor interaction globally
- This promotes health equity and builds needed trust in healthcare systems. To accomplish this our teams harness the power of data and AI-technology to unlock groundbreaking medical insights and convert those insights into action that result in optimal patient outcomes and accelerates an equitable and inclusive drug development lifecycle. Visit h1.co to learn more about us
- Data Engineering is responsible for the development and delivery of our most important asset, our data
- Across thousands of data sources globally, the team ensures that only accurate, normalized data flows to our customers, at the speed required to match real-world changes. As we expand the markets we serve and increase the breadth and depth of data we capture, we need senior technical leaders who can drive execution, scalability, and architectural excellence
- As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Real World Evidence (RWE) team, you'll be one of the most senior individual contributors and a key technical leader responsible for building the backend systems and platform capabilities that power some of H1's largest healthcare datasets
- You'll partner closely with Product, Data Engineering, AI/ML, and downstream engineering teams to turn ambiguous business problems into scalable technical solutions that improve how healthcare data is processed, linked, and delivered
- Act as a self-starter who drives execution independently, taking ownership and initiative with minimal day-to-day direction
- Lead high-impact backend and platform initiatives that support large-scale healthcare data processing and critical customer-facing capabilities
- Own architectural decisions for backend services and distributed systems, ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, and aligned with H1's long-term technical vision
- Design and build highly scalable backend services, APIs, and processing systems capable of supporting hundreds of terabytes of healthcare data
- Partner closely with Product, Data Engineering, AI/ML, and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous business needs into technical roadmaps and production-ready solutions
- Collaborate across engineering teams to reduce technical bottlenecks, improve platform capabilities, and accelerate delivery
- Represent engineering in cross-functional planning discussions, helping shape technical strategy while influencing without formal authority
- Mentor engineers through technical leadership, architectural guidance, design reviews, and thoughtful engineering practices
Application process
- Anticipated role close date: 8/15/2026
Our take
The increasing costs and difficulty of drug discovery requires healthcare organizations and pharmaceutical companies to be able to quickly connect to professionals and thought leaders with specific credentials or research history. H1 addresses these needs by allowing life sciences companies, hospitals and healthcare systems to locate the professionals they need.
H1 is the world’s largest healthcare database. It acts a bit like LinkedIn for healthcare professionals, and has already built a network of more than 9 million users. It has also built a corporate client base of 250 enterprises which is able to access its data which spans more than 250 million patients and over 10 billion health care claims.
The company graduated from Y Combinator's accelerator program in January 2020, and has since raised considerable funding, expanded into Europe and Asia, and built out its data network. It continues to attract investment, most lately from CVS Health Ventures, which showcases the industry regard for its offering.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-7% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
May 2026
$40m
LATE VC
Jun 2022
$23m
SERIES C
Total funding: $227.2m
Company benefits
- Flexible work hours
- Commuter benefits
- Stock options
- Computer setup
- Work from home opportunities
- Health & life insurance
- Retirement options
- Unlimited PTO
- Flex Give & Flex Spend
- Impactful BRGs
Company HQ
Flatiron District, New York, NY
Leadership
Ariel Katz
(CEO & Co-Founder)Previously founded acquired online database, ResearchConnection, before co-founding H1.
Ian Sax
(Co-Founder)Ian has been building businesses for over two decades. He began his start up career at The Carson Group, where he built the firm's global people, institution, and shareholder platform.
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