Senior Backend Software Engineer
About Alpaca Health
Alpaca Health enables clinicians to become entrepreneurs, starting in autism care. We provide AI-powered software, payer contracting, and full back-office infrastructure to help clinicians launch and scale their own clinics. We’ve raised over $14M in funding from early-stage investors and are building for long-term category leadership. This role is full-time and based in New York City or San Francisco, with a 5 days in-office culture. Both founders are technical, and every engineer on the team has experience at early-stage startups.
Role: Senior Backend Software Engineer
We're a tiny engineering team building something large. As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, you'd own the platform foundation—data models, money logic, state machines, API contracts, and AI infrastructure. You'll design, build, and stand behind these critical components. You'll work on a wide range of tasks, from designing schema migration strategies to building LLM pipelines for clinical documentation.
What You’ll Own
Core Platform Integrations: Healthcare runs on a fragmented ecosystem of vendors, clearinghouses, and systems. You'll build and maintain critical integrations with platforms like Candid, Silna, Availity, HubSpot, payroll providers, and state Medicaid systems, ensuring data flows reliably across the entire Alpaca platform.
Revenue & Operations Infrastructure: Own the backend systems that power billing, authorizations, eligibility, patient responsibility, payroll, and provider payouts. You'll design the engines that move millions of dollars through the platform while ensuring accuracy, auditability, and trust.
Internal Systems & Automation: Much of healthcare operations still happens through spreadsheets, PDFs, inboxes, and manual processes. You'll build software and AI-powered workflows that automate credentialing, authorizations, billing operations, compliance, and care coordination, allowing a small team to support thousands of providers.
Data & Reporting Platform: Build the data infrastructure that powers reporting across the company. You'll own the pipelines, models, and backend services that give providers visibility into their businesses and enable internal teams to make operational decisions with confidence.
Payroll & Workforce Systems: Design the systems that power provider compensation, payroll integrations, time tracking, PTO, and workforce operations. You'll help make getting paid feel seamless for clinicians while ensuring compliance and financial accuracy behind the scenes.
Platform Foundations: You'll also own the underlying systems that make everything possible: APIs, data models, event-driven architectures, security, compliance, reliability, and AI infrastructure. We expect engineers to think deeply about system design and build products that remain correct as Alpaca scales from hundreds to thousands of providers.
Who You Are
You've built in environments where mistakes matter. Whether in fintech, healthcare, insurance, logistics, or another operationally complex domain, you've worked on systems where data integrity, money movement, and business rules couldn't be treated as an afterthought. You think in systems, not features. When someone describes a workflow, you naturally start modeling states, transitions, invariants, and edge cases. You enjoy turning messy real-world processes into clean software abstractions.
You have strong product instincts. You care about the user experience as much as the implementation. You can sit with a provider, understand their pain points, and translate them into software that feels simple despite complex underlying logic.
You thrive in ambiguity. You don't need a fully written PRD to get started. You're comfortable taking a loosely defined problem, identifying the important questions, proposing solutions, and driving execution.
You operate with high ownership. You don't think of your job as writing tickets. You think of your job as making a problem disappear. If something is blocking the business, you'll figure out how to solve it regardless of where it falls on the org chart.
You are AI-native. You actively use AI in your day-to-day workflow and are constantly experimenting with new ways to increase leverage. You're excited about what software development, operations, and healthcare workflows look like when AI is a first-class primitive rather than an add-on.
You balance speed with judgment. You know when to move fast and when to invest in foundations. You can build quickly without leaving behind a trail of technical debt that someone else has to clean up later.
You enjoy learning complicated domains. Healthcare is full of exceptions, regulations, payer rules, credentialing requirements, and operational edge cases. Rather than finding that frustrating, you find it intellectually interesting.
You still love writing code. You're experienced enough to lead major technical decisions, but you haven't lost the desire to build. You want to spend your time creating products and systems, not managing process.
Nice to Have Experience
Building AI-powered products in production
Experience with LLM workflows, agents, evals, or developer tooling
Modeling complex operational or financial systems
Healthcare, EHR, insurance, or revenue cycle experience
Experience at an early-stage startup where you owned large parts of the product
🚀 Why Join Now
The decisions made in the next year—how the domain model is structured, how state machines are enforced, how AI workflows are built safely—will define the system for a long time. You'd be joining after product-market fit but before the platform has fully caught up to the business. Not "rescue a failing system." Build the foundation that lets a working, fast-growing system scale correctly. Founding engineer autonomy, real ownership, and a company that's clearly on its way somewhere.
Compensation Range
$200K - $250K