Staff Backend Engineer (RWE, Distributed Systems & Data Platform)

Join H1, a company dedicated to improving healthcare access and equity. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a key role in building the backend systems and platform capabilities that power large healthcare datasets. You will work closely with various teams to turn business problems into scalable technical solutions and mentor other engineers. Enjoy flexible work hours, stock options, unlimited PTO, and more.

• 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.
• 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
• Invest in mentoring teammates and improving engineering practices across the organization
• Enjoy solving messy technical problems and making pragmatic architectural tradeoffs
• Raise the engineering bar through thoughtful design, high-quality code, and strong technical leadership
• Have a proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives from concept through production
• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, helping shape direction across teams
• Bring deep experience designing scalable backend platforms, distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architectures, or infrastructure platforms
• Strong experience designing scalable, reliable backend architectures and making technical decisions around system design, performance, and maintainability
• 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
• Demonstrated ability to independently lead complex technical initiatives, influence architectural direction, and partner effectively across engineering and product organizations
• Strong programming experience in Python or another modern backend language (Java, Go, Scala, C++, etc.) with the ability to quickly become productive in Python
• 8+ years building scalable backend software, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure in production environments
• Experience working in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred) and deploying distributed systems in production
• Experience building systems that process large volumes of data or high-throughput distributed workloads