Backend Engineer for API Development

Backend Engineer Role Overview We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to accelerate the development of our AI-powered voice conversation platform. This role is focused on building scalable backend services, improving our cloud infrastructure, and delivering production-ready APIs that power real-time AI workflows. You will work closely with the founding team to rapidly ship backend features, improve system reliability, and help build the technical foundation for a highly scalable healthcare product. As one of our early engineers, you will work directly with the founders and play an important role in shaping the product during its earliest stages. This is an opportunity to collaborate closely with a world-class AI and healthcare team, including founders with experience at Google DeepMind, Google, Apple, Meta, Stanford University, and leading healthcare institutions. Your work will have an immediate impact on both the product and our users. Primary Objectives - Design and deliver production-ready backend services and APIs that support our AI-powered clinical platform. - Build and optimize high-performance streaming infrastructure for real-time voice AI and LLM-powered workflows. - Develop secure, scalable authentication and authorization systems, including user identity management and API security. - Design, optimize, and maintain relational and NoSQL databases to ensure high availability, reliability, and performance. - Improve cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and backend architecture to support rapid product iteration and scale. - Integrate third-party services, AI models, and external healthcare systems while maintaining reliability and security. - Monitor, identify, troubleshoot, and resolve backend issues in a timely manner to maintain a stable production environment. - Continuously improve code quality, testing, documentation, and engineering best practices. Responsibilities - Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services and RESTful APIs. - Build distributed systems that support low-latency, high-throughput AI applications. - Design and optimize database schemas, queries, caching strategies, and data pipelines. - Implement secure authentication and authorization mechanisms (OAuth, JWT, RBAC, etc.). - Collaborate closely with frontend engineers to define APIs and deliver end-to-end product features. - Build integrations with cloud services, third-party APIs, AI infrastructure, and healthcare systems. - Improve application performance, observability, scalability, and reliability through monitoring and optimization. - Participate in code reviews and contribute to technical architecture and engineering best practices. - Write clean, maintainable, well-tested, and well-documented code. Required Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. - 2+ years of professional backend software engineering experience. - Strong proficiency in Python. - Experience building production-grade RESTful APIs using modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django. - Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, and scalable backend architecture. - Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL technologies (MongoDB, Redis, etc.). - Experience designing efficient database schemas, indexing strategies, and performance optimization. - Experience with cloud platforms. - Familiarity with Docker, containerized deployments, and CI/CD workflows. - Experience with Git and collaborative software development. - Strong debugging, problem-solving, and communication skills. Nice to Have - Experience building real-time streaming systems (WebSockets, gRPC, Server-Sent Events, Kafka, Redis Streams, etc.). - Experience with authentication systems (OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT, RBAC). - Experience with asynchronous programming and task queues (Celery, RabbitMQ, Kafka, etc.). - Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Better Stack, or Datadog. - Experience working with healthcare systems, HIPAA compliance, or healthcare APIs is a plus.