Founding Infra Engineer

About Joyful Health

The healthcare payment system is a complex and inefficient maze - healthcare practices leave $125 billion in revenue uncollected each year, lost in the chaos of fragmented financial data, manual workflows, and opaque payer systems. This financial uncertainty leaves practices struggling to stay afloat, while valuable revenue slips through the cracks. Joyful Health is building the AI-powered financial operating system for healthcare practices. Our mission is to bring the joy back to running a private practice by simplifying financial operations so providers can focus on patient care.

Role Description

• Accelerate the entire engineering team by building novel tooling, automation, and proven infra best practices that dramatically increase development velocity
• Design and maintain high-leverage CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions) that make shipping safe, fast, and frustration-free
• Own our Kubernetes-based platform end-to-end: architecture, deployment strategy, scaling, and overall reliability
• Build a stable, automated infrastructure layer around our Python services, ingestion pipelines, and compute workloads
• Implement robust observability (metrics, logs, tracing) and build a clean operational picture of system health
• Establish strong security foundations: secrets management, IAM hardening, system-level policies, and compliance-friendly patterns
• Improve and optimize PostgreSQL performance, monitoring, and operational stability across workloads
• Drive the team’s infrastructure roadmap and ensure our architecture supports rapid onboarding and growth
• Build internal tooling that reduces complexity, eliminates manual ops, and gives engineers “superpowers”
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product to ensure that infra choices enable—not constrain—our product velocity

What You’ll Do

We’re hiring a founding Infra engineer with deep experience across Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and production-grade reliability. You’ll own the foundation that powers everything we build—our deployment architecture, service mesh, observability stack, and core platform reliability. Our platform ingests, reconciles, and analyzes large volumes of messy financial data from every type of healthcare system imaginable. Keeping that pipeline stable, secure, and scalable is mission-critical.

Requirements

• You’re energized by Joyful Health’s mission—building tools that help providers take control of their financial health
• You want to shape foundational architecture at an early-stage startup and influence technical decisions for years
• You thrive in ambiguous environments and take pride in owning problems end-to-end
• You value craftsmanship, reliability, and clean abstractions—infra that feels elegant, not duct-taped
• You have 5+ years of experience in Infra//SRE/platform engineering roles
• You have strong experience with:
• Kubernetes (EKS or GKE preferred)
• Python engineering workflows
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar)
• PostgreSQL performance, operations, and tuning
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred)
• Cloud networking, security, and IAM best practices

Benefits

• Competitive compensation packages
• Strong equity
• Comprehensive healthcare benefits
• Unlimited PTO (with a minimum of 10 days off a year)
• Flexibility to take care of yourself
• Regular team off-sites and events

Pay

The base pay range for this role is $150,000–$275,000 per year.

Schedule

This role is full-time and based in NYC. You’ll come into the office 3 days a week.