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Salary: USD 230,000 - 280,000 / annual
Qualified Health is building generative AI infrastructure for healthcare, providing guardrails for safe AI governance, healthcare-specific agent creation, and real-time algorithm monitoring. The company works with leading health systems to drive measurable impact on patient care.
As Principal Backend Engineer, you will set the technical direction for the Gen AI for Healthcare SaaS platform. You are one of the most senior technical leaders on the engineering team, responsible for defining the architecture of core services, raising the engineering bar across the organization, and partnering with leadership to translate product strategy into a scalable, secure, and reliable platform. You will stay hands-on in the hardest problems while multiplying the impact of engineers around you.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own architecture and long-term technical vision for core platform services, ensuring they scale with customer growth and regulated healthcare demands
- Lead design and delivery of complex, cross-team initiatives from concept through production, making and documenting high-stakes technical trade-offs
- Write and review critical code, setting standards for quality, maintainability, security, and performance
- Drive infrastructure automation, observability, monitoring, alerting strategy, reliability targets, and incident response practices
- Partner with product, security, compliance, and customer-facing teams to translate requirements into platform capabilities
- Mentor and coach Senior and Staff engineers, growing technical leadership across the team
- Lead technical reviews, architecture decision processes, and creation of durable technical documentation
- Serve as senior escalation point for complex production issues, leading root cause analysis and systemic fixes
- Evaluate emerging technologies in the Gen AI ecosystem and make build-versus-buy recommendations
- Contribute to engineering planning, helping scope, sequence, and de-risk major milestones
The role requires on-site presence in Palo Alto 3 days per week.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Demonstrated track record of designing, shipping, and operating a generative AI application or platform in production at scale
- Deep expertise in Python, with working proficiency in TypeScript or Java and hands-on experience with a modern compiled language such as Go or Rust
- Proven experience architecting distributed systems, microservices, and RESTful APIs that are secure, resilient, and observable
- Deep hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure as code (Terraform)
- Strong command of DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring and observability tooling
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker and Kubernetes) in production environments
- History of technical leadership extending beyond your own code: leading cross-team efforts, influencing architecture decisions, and mentoring other engineers
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineers, executives, and customers
- Strong problem-solving skills and sound judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
DESIRABLE SKILLS:
- Significant experience with GCP and working familiarity with all three major cloud providers
- Experience with AI/ML platforms and frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.), including LLM serving, evaluation, and monitoring
- Experience building platforms in regulated environments (HIPAA, SOC 2, or similar)
- Familiarity with front-end technologies (React, Angular, Vue.js)
- Previous experience in the healthcare industry
- Experience as an early engineering team member at a high-growth company, helping establish technical foundations and engineering culture
