Senior Backend Engineer (Community)

Papa is a new kind of care built on human connection. Across the country, health plans and employers look to Papa to provide vital social support by pairing older adults and families with Papa Pals—trained and vetted companions who provide a helping hand and an open ear, resulting in less loneliness and better health. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Miami, Papa is backed by Canaan, Tiger Global Management, Comcast Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, TCG, Initialized Capital, and Seven Seven Six, among other investors.

You'll be joining Papa Community, a 0-to-1 venture within Papa based in San Francisco that's building virtual care for seniors. You'll have the autonomy and velocity of an early-stage startup with the advantages of a growth-stage company, including Papa's deep expertise serving older adults, established health plan relationships, and reliable capital. As one of the early team members on Community, you'll have a significant tangible impact to improve patient outcomes and drive scalability.

About the Role

We are growing our founding engineering team and looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join Papa Community. You'll work alongside our Staff Backend Engineers and report directly to Papa Community's GM, with dotted-line mentorship from Papa core's engineering leadership. This is a rare chance to help shape a platform in its earliest days without giving up the stability of an established company behind you.

As Papa Community's engineering team grows, there will be more opportunities to take on broader technical leadership. This role is a chance to build that track record early, working alongside our Staff Engineers and partnering directly with the GM.

This role is unique because:

• You'll help extend the technical architecture for Papa Community. Working alongside our Staff Backend Engineers, you'll contribute to system design, technology choices, and engineering practices that will define Community for years to come.
• You'll own problems, not tickets. You won't be handed a fully-scoped spec—you'll be handed a problem the business is facing and given real latitude to figure out the best way to solve it.
• You'll partner directly with the GM. Your voice will shape product decisions, build vs. buy trade-offs, and day-to-day technical priorities.
• You'll leverage Papa's infrastructure while maintaining startup velocity. You can access Papa's deployment pipelines, security compliance, and DevOps support—but make decisions in days, not weeks, and ship at a pace that matches the urgency of the people we serve.
• You'll get institutional advantages without enterprise bureaucracy.

What makes this role challenging:

• You'll navigate complex healthcare integrations. Our platform connects EHRs, care management platforms, revenue cycle management, and patient communication tools. You'll need to build strong familiarity with healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7, X12) and resilient API integration patterns.
• You'll balance technical perfection with shipping velocity. We're a startup—sometimes the right answer is "ship it and iterate" rather than "architect the perfect solution."
• You'll work in a high-autonomy environment with a lot of open questions and comparatively little established process. You'll influence stakeholders, make recommendations, and own outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Build out our platform. You'll help build and scale Papa Community's proprietary platform—the operational backbone for our care team. This is a multi-quarter build with substantial room to grow.
• Strengthen our revenue cycle management pipeline. You'll work on ongoing integration and improvement of our RCM vendor relationship—claims data pipelines, denial handling, and patient responsibility workflows.
• Extend our platform and tooling investments. You'll help build out remaining platform needs, including transactional email, customer support tooling, and other member- and internal-facing systems.
• Enable operational intelligence and automation. You'll help build the data infrastructure and tooling that allows our clinical team to make informed decisions, automate care workflows, and track patient outcomes in real-time.
• Contribute to critical technical decisions. You'll weigh in on build vs. buy trade-offs and technology choices, partnering with our Staff Engineers and the GM on our technical roadmap.
• Support engineering practices as we grow. You'll help maintain code standards, testing expectations, deployment processes, and technical documentation practices.
• Own system reliability and performance for the areas you build. This means building resilient systems for healthcare-critical workflows where reliability isn't optional—claim submissions, patient data accuracy, and care coordination all need to work consistently.

Skills

• Core Competencies:
  • A genuine appetite for ambiguity and ownership—you're energized by open questions and evolving standards.
  • A bias toward velocity—you want to ship, see it working, and iterate. You feel the urgency of building something that patients and clinicians depend on.
  • Product mindset—you think like a founder, balancing technical excellence with business outcomes, revenue, and patient impact.
  • Independent ownership—you own the full lifecycle of features and projects without needing a fully-scoped spec.
  • Strong backend expertise—solid understanding of distributed systems, API design, and scalable architecture. We build in Elixir and look for candidates with a solid understanding of it.
  • System design and reliability—you build resilient, well-tested systems with proper monitoring and rollout practices for healthcare-critical workloads.
  • High autonomy and ownership—you thrive in ambiguous environments, educate non-technical stakeholders, and own outcomes.
  • Startup adaptability—you're highly communicative across operational and clinical teams, move fast when needed, and know when to ship quickly versus architect for scale.
  • Continuous improvement mindset—you proactively identify areas for improvement in systems and processes.

Requirements

• 6+ years of software development experience
• Strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails or Python
• 1+ years of hands-on experience with Elixir
• Experience building and shipping high-quality work and achieving high reliability
• Experience improving quality through thoughtful code reviews, appropriate testing, proper rollout, and monitoring
• Passionate about improving healthcare access and outcomes

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working as one of the first engineers at an early-stage startup, or otherwise building without an established engineering org around you
• Deeper Elixir expertise, including Phoenix LiveView
• Experience with healthcare technology including data standards (FHIR, HL7, X12), EHR/vendor integrations, HIPAA-compliant systems for protected health information, and healthcare-specific APIs (clearinghouses, billing platforms)

Schedule

Hybrid with 2-3 days per week in-office in San Francisco, CA.

Pay

Target Salary Range: $160,000 - $210,000 (actual compensation determined by candidate experience, location, education, certifications, and skill set).

Meaningful equity package.

Benefits

• Health & Wellness: Medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage; Health Savings Account (HSA) & Flexible Spending Account (FSA).
• Retirement: 401(k) plan with a company match up to 4%.
• Time Off: Flexible PTO, 11 paid company holidays, parental leave, and caregiver leave.