Principal Software Engineer (Backend & Product Systems)

What You’ll Be Working On

The engineering organization builds the backend systems responsible for ingesting healthcare information, processing documents, coordinating workflows, integrating with external systems, and automating operational tasks.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will help design and improve systems involving:

Customer-facing healthcare workflow automation
High-volume document ingestion and processing pipelines
Distributed backend services and asynchronous workflows
Event-driven systems coordinating complex operational processes
APIs and integrations with healthcare platforms and external services
Electronic health record synchronization
Reliable workflow orchestration, retries, and state management
Document classification and structured information extraction
Patient communication, intake, referral, and scheduling workflows
AI-assisted automation and LLM-powered product capabilities
Platform scalability, observability, and production reliability
Backend architecture supporting continued customer and product growth

About the Role

Our client is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to help architect, build, and scale the backend systems powering its healthcare workflow automation platform.

This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor position for an experienced backend engineer who can make high-impact architectural decisions while continuing to write production software.

You will work across distributed systems, workflow orchestration, APIs, integrations, document-processing pipelines, data models, and customer-facing product infrastructure.

The ideal candidate has spent their career building and scaling software products rather than focusing primarily on internal infrastructure, DevOps, data platforms, or experimental AI systems. You should be comfortable taking ownership of technically ambiguous problems, evaluating architectural tradeoffs, and designing systems that remain reliable as the product, engineering organization, and customer base grow.

This role requires more than strong implementation skills. Our client is looking for someone who can understand how the entire product operates, identify the architectural decisions that matter most, and guide those decisions from design through production.

You will have significant influence over the future direction of the platform while remaining closely involved in building it.

What You Will Do

Architect scalable backend systems supporting customer-facing healthcare products and workflow automation
Lead major technical initiatives from early discovery and system design through implementation, launch, and continued production improvement
Design distributed services and event-driven workflows that process healthcare documents, data, and operational tasks
Build reliable systems for workflow orchestration, asynchronous processing, retries, failure recovery, and state management
Improve the scalability, performance, reliability, and maintainability of the existing platform
Design and maintain APIs used by customer-facing applications, healthcare integrations, and internal services
Develop systems that integrate with electronic health records and other external healthcare platforms
Build and improve high-volume document ingestion, classification, processing, and extraction pipelines
Evaluate when existing systems should be extended, redesigned, simplified, or replaced
Make thoughtful architectural tradeoffs involving product velocity, reliability, scalability, complexity, and long-term maintainability
Identify bottlenecks, failure modes, and architectural risks before they affect customers or slow product development
Improve observability, monitoring, tracing, and production debugging across backend services and workflows
Establish durable engineering patterns for service boundaries, APIs, event processing, data consistency, and failure handling
Work with technologies such as Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript, MySQL, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud Platform
Support AI-assisted product capabilities and LLM integrations as components within broader customer-facing workflows
Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, Operations, and Executive Leadership to translate healthcare problems into scalable technical solutions
Communicate architecture decisions, technical risks, and engineering tradeoffs clearly to technical and nontechnical stakeholders
Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers while remaining deeply hands-on
Raise the engineering standard for backend architecture, systems design, code quality, and technical ownership
Proactively identify important technical problems and take ownership of solving them with minimal oversight

What Our Client Is Looking For

Extensive software engineering experience building production backend applications and customer-facing software products
Principal, Senior Staff, Staff, or equivalent individual contributor experience
Significant ownership of backend architecture across complex production systems
Experience personally designing and building distributed systems from the ground up
Strong experience scaling software platforms through meaningful customer, transaction, or data growth
Experience with event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, queues, and workflow orchestration
Strong understanding of APIs, service boundaries, data models, state management, and distributed system failure modes
Experience designing systems for idempotency, retries, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability
Strong experience with one or more backend languages such as Ruby, Python, Go, Java, or a comparable language
Experience working with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL
Experience with cloud platforms and containerized production environments
Experience building and operating services using Kubernetes or similar orchestration technologies
Ability to independently evaluate architecture options and clearly explain the reasoning behind technical decisions
Experience operating systems after launch and improving them based on real production behavior
Strong product instincts and an understanding of how technical decisions affect users and business outcomes
Experience working closely with Product and business stakeholders in addition to engineering teams
Strong written and verbal communication skills
Startup, scale-up, or high-growth technology company experience preferred
Ability to work collaboratively in a hybrid New York City environment

Principal-Level Expectations

You have personally architected and built complex backend systems used by real customers
You have owned major technical initiatives from initial design through implementation, launch, and long-term production support
You can translate an ambiguous product or business problem into a scalable technical architecture
You understand how individual services, workflows, integrations, and data models fit into the broader product platform
You have made architectural decisions that materially improved the direction, scalability, or reliability of a software product
You can recognize when a system requires a new architectural approach and when a simpler incremental improvement is the better decision
You make thoughtful tradeoffs between delivery speed, system complexity, scalability, reliability, and maintainability
You can design dependable systems that account for failures, retries, partial processing, duplicate events, and unavailable dependencies
You remain deeply hands-on and are comfortable contributing production code alongside other engineers
You influence engineering direction through technical judgment, communication, and execution rather than relying on organizational authority
You can identify technical risks and opportunities before they are formally assigned
You are comfortable operating in an environment where requirements and priorities evolve as the company grows
You can communicate complex system designs clearly during architecture discussions and technical reviews
You understand that strong architecture should improve both the customer experience and the engineering team’s ability to deliver

Modern Backend Engineering Approach

Strong software engineering fundamentals and a production-first mindset
Product-oriented thinking focused on building capabilities customers use and depend on
Pragmatic approach to languages, frameworks, infrastructure, and architectural patterns
Ability to balance long-term architecture with the practical needs of a growing company
Strong understanding of distributed system design and production failure modes
Preference for clear service boundaries, reliable workflows, and understandable operational behavior
Experience using automated testing, monitoring, tracing, and observability to improve production systems
Ability to create systems that remain debuggable as complexity and volume increase
Comfortable working across application code, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, and product workflows
Willingness to challenge unnecessary complexity and choose the simplest architecture capable of reliably solving the problem
Comfortable introducing structure and technical standards without slowing down a high-ownership engineering team
Ability to use modern AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully while maintaining strong engineering judgment and code quality

Nice to Have

Healthcare technology experience
Experience building products for healthcare providers, clinical teams, or healthcare operations
Experience integrating with electronic health record systems
Familiarity with healthcare interoperability standards such as FHIR or HL7
Experience working with HIPAA-regulated data and healthcare security requirements
Experience building document-processing or data-extraction pipelines
Experience with OCR, document classification, or unstructured data processing
Experience building workflow automation platforms
Experience with referral, scheduling, intake, patient communication, or clinical administration systems
Experience with high-volume API integrations and external system synchronization
Experience with Ruby, Python, Go, or JavaScript in production environments
Experience with Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, and MySQL
Experience incorporating LLMs, retrieval systems, or AI-assisted automation into customer-facing products
Experience improving an existing production architecture rather than only building greenfield systems
Experience at a high-growth SaaS, fintech, healthcare technology, marketplace, communications, or enterprise software company