Lead Backend Platform Engineer, January

• 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 — not just calling a model API
• Day-to-day fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) as part of your normal development loop

Desirable

• We are hiring a Lead Backend Platform Engineer to own and strengthen a broad backend surface area spanning app APIs, partner APIs, EHR integrations, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and observability
• 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
• What success looks like:
• Within 90 days, a new partner can integrate against our API in roughly a week with you as their primary technical contact
• When a user-facing failure happens, you can localize the cause across ingestion, AI generation, and infrastructure and fix it without escalating
• Prompt and pipeline changes ship behind a regression evaluation that catches quality drops before production
• Auth, ingestion, and report incidents trend down because you've added the missing tracing, limits, and tests
• The team has a stronger technical leader who communicates clearly, takes ownership, and raises the bar
• This person will report directly to the CTO and work very closely with our AI Lead. For the right person, this is an opportunity to have outsized impact: solving hard systems problems, improving the technical foundation of the company, and helping shape how January builds production-grade AI products
• Real ownership across the stack: You'll own the systems that connect a person's clinical and lifestyle data to AI-generated insights — used by both our consumer app and the enterprise partners we serve
• A team that can back the work: You'll work alongside Stanford-trained scientists, AI researchers, and operators who've shipped at scale, reporting to the CTO with the AI Lead as a close partner
• Research-credentialed product: Our clinical reasoning model has published benchmarks that hold up against the largest general-purpose LLMs. We treat scientific credibility as a product requirement, not marketing
• Our team collaborates in real-time during standard working hours Pacific Time