Senior Python Engineer (Backend)

Alaffia is a new kind of claims operations partner for health plans. Using expert clinicians and transparent AI, we deliver deeper insights, smarter automation, and consistently better outcomes across the entire lifecycle of claims. With Alaffia, health plans can cut wasted spending more effectively than ever — and provide their members the most affordable care. We’re a high-growth, venture-backed Series B healthtech startup based in NYC and are actively scaling our company.

About the Role

Alaffia Health is a healthcare AI startup revolutionizing medical billing and data automation. Our AI-driven platform leverages state-of-the-art generative AI and machine learning technologies to enhance accuracy, efficiency, and compliance in medical billing and auditing. As we scale, you will build cutting-edge AI products, drive innovation, and shape the future of healthcare automation. You will have the opportunity to work with the latest AI technologies while implementing features that directly impact healthcare organizations. You will build the GenAI framework for the engineering team and lead the effort to scale our GenAI applications. In this role, you'll tackle challenging problems in web development, system design, and cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate cross-functionally with other engineering disciplines, including full-stack, data, DevOps, and AI engineers, as well as product and business teams to craft a feature-rich GenAI-powered agentic workflow framework to speed up Alaffia Health’s AI agent development workflow.
• Design, develop, and deploy data-intensive applications with Python in a production environment.
• Write code that captures the essential nature of the solution and is appropriately flexible, reusable, efficient, and adaptable to changing requirements.
• Provide high-quality code review feedback and foster an effective, collaborative code review culture.
• Responsible for successful delivery of projects, including planning, risk management, design, development, testing, rollout, and maintenance.
• Identify ways to simplify application code/infrastructure and improve developer efficiency as measured by cycle time, ramp-up time, or similar metrics.
• Preemptively identify and resolve technical risks before they jeopardize the project; resolve cross-team dependencies earlier to ensure successful execution.
• Avoid reinventing the wheel by leveraging existing Alaffia Health solutions or off-the-shelf solutions with trade-offs in mind.
• Design software or systems in your area of ownership and ensure they meet their design objectives.
• Give quality feedback on designs written by other team members, asking probing questions that solidify choices and surface erroneous assumptions.
• Effectively and quickly debug cross-module issues, leveraging deep knowledge of libraries, platforms, and systems.
• Create coherent designs with multiple components interacting across API or system boundaries, ensuring bugs do’t creep in due to mismatches in expectations.
• Roll out components or major features reliably, including appropriate monitoring, paging, and understanding of failure domains to avoid introducing toil and future maintenance work.
• Design clear success metrics and achieve those metrics consistently post-launch through the lifetime of the system or feature.
• Engage in listening sessions to guide work and priorities, and have a working knowledge of Alaffia Health’s strategy and organizational structure to collaborate effectively across the org.

Requirements

• 7+ years of industry experience with large-scale and production-level API development and backend data processing.
• Experience developing test suites and working with CI/CD tooling for automation.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases and data model design.
• Experience utilizing and improving observability practices, including logging and user activity metrics to integrate with tools like Datadog.

Preferred Qualifications

• Building SaaS apps in the healthcare sector.
• Building and deploying user-facing AI products.
• Building Python SDKs/libraries.
• Experience with DevOps and cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Experience with vector databases.
• Experience with data processing orchestrators, such as Airflow or Dagster.
• Experience with message queue systems, such as AWS SQS, Kinesis, or Kafka.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation (salary + equity).
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible, paid vacation policy.

Culture

Alaffia was born out of our founders’ personal connection to the inefficiency of the U.S. healthcare system. We are deeply mission-driven, with an abiding belief that technology can help create a better future for everyone. We work in a flat organizational structure with direct access to leadership.