Job Overview
We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Senior Backend Engineer to join our dynamic development team. In this role, you will lead the design, development, and maintenance of scalable backend systems that power innovative web applications and services. Your expertise will drive the creation of robust APIs, microservices, and distributed systems, ensuring high performance, security, and reliability. As a key contributor, you will collaborate closely with front-end developers, system architects, and product managers to deliver seamless digital experiences that meet business goals and user needs. This is an exciting opportunity to influence the future of our platform through cutting-edge technology and best practices in software engineering.
What You'll Own
- Production and staging backend infrastructure
- Deploys, rollbacks, environment management, release safety
- Database operations — migrations, backups, restores, performance
- Background jobs, queues, retries, worker health, failure recovery
- Security — secrets, access control, infrastructure hardening, auditability, sensitive data handling (HIPAA + SOC 2 maintenance is in scope)
- Monitoring, logging, alerts, incident response
- Runbooks and operational documentation
- First 30 days: make the existing product scalable to onboard 20 users at a time. Harden the scrappy early infrastructure into something that can serve the September cohort of 180 clinicians.
- First 90 days: build out features on the roadmap as the next bottleneck shifts from infrastructure to product surface area.
- First 6 months: function as the de facto technical advisor — guide the two new-grad engineers, advise Eshan on hiring sequencing, organize the engineering function as the team scales toward Series A.
Requirements
- 3+ years of professional engineering experience, if someone has 10-20 YOE, that'd be amazing.
- Strong production backend systems experience — has personally operated backend systems in production, on-call, debugging across application code and infrastructure
- Solid fundamentals in Linux, containers, networking, cloud infrastructure, databases
- Good security judgment, especially for systems handling sensitive customer data (HIPAA-grade is the bar — Perspectives is already HIPAA + SOC 2 compliant)
- Background job / queue / scheduler experience — long-running workloads with retry and failure recovery
- Cross-stack debugging fluency — application code, infrastructure, database, third-party services
- Has worked at a US company before
- Has worked at a startup before — strongly preferred
- Cracked with AI tooling — uses Claude / Cursor / Codex daily as a force multiplier
- Self-starter — Able to take a problem, figure out what matters, and start moving with minimal guidance
Pay: $170,000.00 - $250,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Employee discount
- Health insurance
- Relocation assistance
- Vision insurance
Application Question(s):
- Will you be able to reliably commute or relocate to Chicago, IL for this job?
Experience:
- Back-end development: 3 years (Required)
- Healthcare or HIPAA-grade systems: 3 years (Required)
- Infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD: 3 years (Required)
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Chicago, IL 60618
