Lead Backend & Platform Engineer, ISLA
€92-110k
Empowering clinicians to streamline healthcare delivery
Open for applications
Empowering clinicians to streamline healthcare delivery
21-100 employees
Open for applications
€92-110k
21-100 employees
Company mission
To lead the global shift to digital pathway platforms, redefining how healthcare is delivered through intelligent pathways that optimise care, empower clinicians, and improve patient outcomes at scale
Role
Who you are
- If you are a builder who thrives on high-stakes platform stability and wants to lead a team through 100% YoY growth, this role provides a level of agency and impact rarely found in later-stage environments
- Proven technical leadership: Experience as a Lead or Senior Engineer, ideally having managed scaling challenges in a high-growth startup
- GCP & platform mastery: Deep hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)
- Backend expertise: Expert-level understanding of Node.js and TypeScript
- Integration experience: Comfortable architecting platforms that interact with diverse third-party APIs and robust authentication protocols
- People management: A passion for mentoring and managing engineers
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Platform Engineering Lead to own the technical implementation and scalability of our cloud infrastructure
- As the technical authority for our backend team, you will be responsible for ensuring our Digital Pathway Platform is architected for seamless scalability across international health systems
- This is a pivotal leadership position where you will drive technical excellence, directly impacting the lives of millions of patients by enabling a new asynchronous and remote operating model for healthcare
- Own the platform & infrastructure: Lead the architecture, security, and stability of our GCP platform, ensuring it is built for 100% YoY growth
- Lead the backend team: Manage and inspire a high-performance team of senior and mid-level backend engineers (3-5 people), fostering a culture of engineering excellence that balances pace with uncompromising quality
- Drive platform efficiency: Act as the primary steward for technical cost-optimisation and resource management, ensuring the platform scales efficiently as our user base grows
- Architect complex integrations: Design robust systems to handle deep integrations with external partner APIs, managing diverse authentication mechanisms and resilient data patterns
- Drive technical strategy: Act as a key partner to the CTO and Director of Engineering (currently also being hired), aligning technical execution with business objectives
- Embed operational excellence: Refine best-in-class engineering practices - including IaC via Terraform, CI/CD, and security audit readiness - to prevent major production incidents
- Lead AI workflows: Act as an authority to drive agentic workflows forwards across the team
- We are building a new operating model for healthcare in which care is delivered remotely, asynchronously and increasingly personalised. You will be building the infrastructure for how we deliver this shift. This role offers the rare opportunity to exercise true technical ownership over a mission-critical platform
- You will have the autonomy to set the technical pace, drive architectural decisions, and foster a culture of engineering excellence across the backend organisation
- The structure: You will lead the Backend/Platform team. As the lead, you will report directly to our Director of Engineering
- Cross-functional collaboration: You’ll work in a tight loop with our Product, Design, and Frontend teams
- We lean into modern, scalable infrastructure (Node.js, TypeScript, GCP). We prioritise tools that enable velocity - such as Terraform and automated CI/CD
- We also lean heavily into AI, and you’ll be able (encouraged) to use whatever tools you need to scale your own and the team’s workflows
Application process
- Interviewing with us for the Lead Backend role will be split into 3 stages (all conducted virtually):
- 1️⃣ A screening interview with one of our Operations Managers - 15 minutes
- 2️⃣ A technical strategy deep dive: We will run through a scenario to challenge you on your decision making, the speed of your technical understanding, your communication and your out-of-the-box thinking
- 3️⃣ Founder interview: To deep dive in to how you operate as a leader to achieve amazing outcomes
Our take
Isla wants to empower healthcare professionals by allowing them to use visual data—photos and videos of patients—by securely recording this data to a medical professional's smartphone.
The ambitious startup has partnered with the Central London Community Healthcare Trust and the NHS, successfully supporting various NHS trusts on their digitisation journey. Isla will focus on leveraging visual data to improve end-of-life care and dermatology services. Additionally, the company has added an Impact page to its website, showcasing evidence of Isla's benefits.
Now that a case can be made for visual health data flows being helpful, the company's platform could see even wider adoption. Once sufficiently high-quality data sets have been collected, Isla can use the visual data, provided with patient consent, to inform medical practice more generally.
The next few years at Isla should be interesting as the company is looking to replicate the operation of its product across several hospitals and healthcare facilities. Isla's end game is to be fully integrated into all incumbent Patient Administration Systems to make the platform seamless for clinicians.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Company benefits
- 🏡 Work from home or at our office in Moorgate 🏢
- 🏖️ 25 days annual leave (on top of bank holidays)
- 🎂 Take your birthday off
- 🎄 Take an important holiday off
- 🕜 Flexible working times
- 🧘♀️ A monthly wellbeing bonus (£50 per month to spend on gym membership or wellbeing activities) Or private medical
- 🍜 £75 every quarter to treat friend/family to a meal
- 📈 Equity options available
- 📚 Learning budget
- 🎉 Enhanced parental leave (12 weeks fully paid leave for primary care givers and 4 weeks fully paid leave for secondary care givers on top of the statutory leave)
- ❤️🩹 Enhanced health leave
- 💗 Delivering social impact through improved patient healthcare
- 🎇 A whole lot of fun on an exciting journey
- 💡 Working at a well funded and rapidly growing start up, solving a global problem in a new way
- 🌍 Work abroad for up to 90 days a year
- 🐾 Dog friendly office
Company values
- Look back proudly - We deliver excellence & act with integrity, every time
- Race forward - The need for change in healthcare delivery is urgent. We challenge ourselves to set a fast pace in all that we do and encourage ambition within our team and with our customers
- Laugh along the way - We recognise the impact that we are having in the world, and enjoy the process of making that happen, however tough that is
Company HQ
City of London, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
James Jurkiewicz
(Co-Founder & CTO)Oxford Engineering alum with healthcare consulting experience at Newton Europe and start-up experience at Onfido.
Peter Hansell
(Co-Founder)Worked in healthcare consulting as a Senior Consultant at Newton Europe and then at DrDoctor.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at ISLA
- At Isla, we believe that embracing diverse perspectives leads to innovation, creativity, and better business outcomes.
- We know that diverse teams work better. It's simple: when people from a wide range of backgrounds come together, they bring unique ideas, insights and problem-solving approaches. Diversity challenges conventional thinking, encourages collaboration, and fuels innovation. This diversity of thought creates a dynamic environment where ideas flourish, and we can deliver an exceptional product to our users.
- We are committed to placing DE&I at the forefront of our hiring and operational thinking. We actively seek out individuals from all walks of life, irrespective of their gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, or abilities. We believe that diversity should not only be celebrated but embraced.
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