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Carbon Health, a physician-founded healthcare technology company, is seeking a Tech Lead - Platform Engineer to drive the technical direction of the core platform and foundational services that power the organization's backend systems, service-to-service communication, and infrastructure.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role combining architectural vision with hands-on coding. You will set the technical direction for highly available, scalable backend systems while remaining actively involved in code design and review. The role operates in a JVM-based microservices environment on AWS, where reliability, data integrity, and security directly impact patient care.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading technical work on building and scaling Carbon Health's core platform and foundational services
- Driving architectural decisions for highly available, scalable backend systems and documenting trade-offs
- Shaping service-to-service communication patterns: gRPC contracts, deadlines, timeouts, retries, idempotency, and graceful degradation
- Designing event-driven and asynchronous workflows using patterns such as idempotent consumers, dead-letter handling, Saga, and Transactional Outbox
- Owning platform infrastructure as code: setting Terraform standards, reviewing infrastructure changes, and maintaining reproducible environments
- Building and improving CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, rapid deployment of small changes
- Defining service-level objectives and implementing observability through metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting
- Leading incident response and blameless post-mortems, translating findings into reliability improvements
- Guiding data design across relational databases, caches, and search stores for predictable performance at scale
- Integrating security and compliance into the platform: access control, encryption, secrets management, and audit trails for healthcare data
- Mentoring engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing; providing technical leadership across backend and frontend domains
- Fostering a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and fast, reliable delivery
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production
- 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership role
- Strong experience with microservice architectures on AWS
- Proficiency in at least one strongly typed JVM language (Kotlin, Scala, or Java preferred)
- Hands-on experience with gRPC or similar RPC frameworks, including contract design, timeouts, retries, and failure handling
- Experience with event-driven architecture and message queues, including delivery and consistency challenges
- Solid experience with relational databases (schema design, indexing, query performance), caching, and search data stores
- Hands-on experience managing infrastructure with Terraform
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
- Experience running services in production: observability, incident response, and root-cause analysis
- Ability to work as an independent technical leader, designing and delivering capabilities with distributed teams
- Professional working proficiency in English (written and verbal)
Nice-to-have qualifications:
- Experience in healthcare technology or other highly regulated industries
- Experience with healthcare data standards (HL7 or FHIR)
- Experience with resilience patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting)
- Experience with stream processing or change data capture
- Experience with containers and container orchestration
- Experience reducing cloud costs or improving network and security posture at platform level
- Strong interest in using AI efficiently and responsibly in software development
