Senior Backend/ Infrastructure Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Backend / Infrastructure Engineer who wants to own the systems that power Thrive's member experience end to end. This is a senior individual contributor role ideal for someone with 5 to 8+ years of experience who loves designing resilient APIs, integrating messy real-world systems, and owning production infrastructure on AWS.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship
• Contribute hands-on across our backend and infrastructure while establishing long-term engineering foundations.
• Own development across our core backend technologies:
• JavaScript/TypeScript services deployed on AWS (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway)
• Supabase, Postgres, and Snowflake for storage, APIs, and analytics workflows
• Integration layers with health plan partners, Auth0, Zoho CRM, Sanity CMS, and wireless provisioning systems
• Harden operational workflows currently running on low-code tools (n8n, SQL scripts) into production services with proper observability, tests, and rollback paths.
• Design and own
• Drive architecture for the systems behind our three strategic pillars: Data-Driven Personalization at Scale, "Do It for Me" AI Enablement, and the Unified Member Hub.
• Lead end-to-end integrations across our vendor surface, including migrations when we outgrow a dependency.
• Author architecture decision records and runbooks as you go — we believe institutional knowledge belongs in the repo, not in people's heads.
• Collaborate and execute
• Partner with product, design, and operations to turn goals into actionable roadmaps.
• Work alongside compliance and member experience to ensure we deliver secure, dependable service to members managing real health conditions on Medicaid and Medicare.
• Drive architectural decisions that balance innovation with a simple, maintainable, startup-friendly stack.
• Strategize and improve
• Set the bar for API design, testing discipline, observability, and on-call practices as the team grows.
• Improve reliability, security, and developer workflows across our systems.
• Identify opportunities to streamline processes and ship features faster without compromising reliability.

About You

• Experience and skills
• 5–8+ years building and owning production backend systems through design, launch, and the phase where the bill for early decisions comes due.
• Strong API design fundamentals — REST and event-driven. You have opinions about versioning, idempotency, error shapes, pagination, and backward compatibility, and you can defend them without reaching for a framework's docs. Whether you've shipped it in NestJS, Express, Fastify, Go, or Rails matters less than whether the contracts you design hold up.
• Proficiency with:
• JavaScript/TypeScript, Python or Kotlin backend services
• AWS infrastructure and cloud services (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, IAM)
• Postgres and Supabase for backend data storage and APIs
• Snowflake or similar cloud data warehousing platforms
• Integration experience — you've built against underdocumented vendor APIs, handled webhook retries in production, and know that "the docs say it returns JSON" is not a guarantee.
• Observability as a default, not a phase-two — structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerts that page humans only when humans should be paged.
• Strong understanding of data modeling and data engineering concepts — you know when to normalize, when to denormalize, and why "just add a JSONB column" is sometimes right and often wrong.
• Nice to have: NestJS specifically (our current backend framework), Terraform or similar IaC, Sanity CMS, Auth0, healthcare or regulated-data environments (HIPAA, SOC 2), experience deploying AI agents or LLM-powered workflows.
• Ways of working
• Ownership-first mindset — you treat the systems you build as yours. You see it, you own it, you ship it.
• Ability to balance speed and long-term architectural thinking — ship behind flags, plan the rollback, and don't stall deploys out of fear.
• Radical transparency and no hoarding — decisions, trade-offs, and "I tried this and it didn't work" notes all belong in the repo.
• Data-driven problem solver with strong reasoning and clarity in decision-making.
• Excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical teammates.
• Traits we love
• Scrappy, resourceful, and motivated to build quickly.
• Curious, humble, and eager to learn.
• Passionate about serving underserved communities and improving healthcare access through technology.
• Member first, always — every technical decision gets filtered through the question: does this make a member's next interaction with us easier or harder?

Compensation & Benefits

• $185,000–$200,000 base + performance bonus (up to 10%) + meaningful equity
• Standardized salaries based on position, no matter where you live
• Incentive Stock Options aligned to salary, role and impact
• Hybrid work options in New York, NY
• Thrive Mobile Mission Days: 4x per year we individually take a full day away from the office to connect with the Thrive mission
• $2,000 annual learning & development budget
• Unlimited vacation and sick days
• $1,000 yearly vacation bonus for taking five consecutive days of vacation, fully unplugged from work
• Up to six weeks of paid bereavement leave, medical leave, and disaster leave
• 12-week paid parental leave after 6 months at the company
• 5-week sabbatical on your 5 year anniversary
• Health insurance, dental and vision, commuter benefits, & 401(k) benefits with company matching
• Guaranteed minimum 1-month severance if things don't work out