Staff Backend Engineer

About the company

Our client is a healthcare AI company building clinical documentation, provider copilots and other tools that help care teams spend more time with patients. Its products serve more than 500,000 clinicians and support more than 100 million patient interactions. Backed by leading technology investors, the company has grown more than 300% year over year for two consecutive years.

The role / why it matters

As Staff Backend Engineer, you will own the distributed systems and reliability behind ambient AI workflows on mobile and web. This is a priority hire for a team handling long recording sessions, compute-heavy inference and unreliable networks. You will set technical direction, remain hands-on and help other engineers build systems ready for production.

What you'll do

• Design, build and operate backend systems for long-form audio ingestion, media processing and real-time and asynchronous streams.

• Orchestrate multi-stage transcription, diarization, LLM, clinical extraction and summarization workflows, including scheduling, queues, retries, timeouts, dead-letter handling, idempotency, replay and graceful degradation.

• Partner with mobile, product, AI, security and clinical teams to support poor network conditions and seamless offline workflows.

• Define SLOs and build observability with structured logs, metrics, distributed traces, dashboards and alerts.

• Lead incident response and post-incident analysis, then eliminate recurring failures through architecture, automation and testing.

• Evolve APIs, service boundaries, data models, cloud infrastructure and deployment systems while balancing reliability, latency, quality and infrastructure cost.

• Mentor engineers and establish standards for distributed systems and operational readiness.

What we're looking for

• 7-15 years of backend, platform or infrastructure engineering experience, typically 8+ years, with exceptional candidates considered from 7 years.

• A current Staff Engineer or Tech Lead title and demonstrated ownership of technical direction, hands-on delivery and cross-functional alignment.

• Experience designing, building and operating production distributed systems at scale.

• Strong Python skills or proficiency in a modern backend language, with experience designing backend APIs, service boundaries, data models or marketplace search and recommendation infrastructure.

• Experience at high-bar large technology companies or Series B+ startups; a mix of structured engineering environments and hands-on startup or founding experience is valued.

• A Computer Science or other technical degree from a top-30 school, or mid-tier schooling supported by top-tier professional experience.

• Comfort with ambiguity, fast iteration and taking work from idea to production without extensive guidance.

• Strong communication, technical leadership and interest in healthcare technology.

Bonus points

• Audio, speech, dictation or real-time media streaming experience.

• Healthcare technology, Epic systems or experience in regulated environments such as HIPAA and SOC 2.

• Experience with Temporal, Kafka, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, SQS, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, OpenTelemetry, Grafana or Sentry.

• Experience orchestrating LLM or multimodel inference workflows.

Compensation and benefits

• $250,000-$300,000 annual base salary.

• A hybrid work model and ownership of systems that directly affect clinician workflows.

Location / work model

Full-time and hybrid in Mountain View, California. Candidates must already be based in the San Francisco Bay Area and able to attend the Mountain View office at least 3 days each week. The team may expect 4-5 days for people living nearby; the final cadence should be confirmed during the hiring process. Los Angeles is not an option and relocation support is not available. Existing visa transfers may be considered; new visa sponsorship is not available.