Staff Backend Engineer (RWE) - Distributed Systems & Data Platform

About You

You're a Staff-level backend engineer who enjoys solving difficult technical problems at scale. You thrive in environments where requirements aren't always fully defined and enjoy bringing clarity to ambiguity. You naturally think in terms of systems, architecture, and long-term scalability while remaining hands-on enough to build production software. You're excited by the opportunity to work with complex, real-world datasets and are eager to deepen your expertise in large-scale distributed data systems while leveraging your strong backend engineering foundation.

What You'll Do At H1

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Real World Evidence (RWE) team, you'll be one of the most senior individual contributors and a key technical leader responsible for building the backend systems and platform capabilities that power some of H1's largest healthcare datasets. You'll partner closely with Product, Data Engineering, AI/ML, and downstream engineering teams to turn ambiguous business problems into scalable technical solutions that improve how healthcare data is processed, linked, and delivered.

• Act as a self-starter who drives execution independently, taking ownership and initiative with minimal day-to-day direction.
• Lead high-impact backend and platform initiatives that support large-scale healthcare data processing and critical customer-facing capabilities.
• Own architectural decisions for backend services and distributed systems, ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, and aligned with H1's long-term technical vision.
• Design and build highly scalable backend services, APIs, and processing systems capable of supporting hundreds of terabytes of healthcare data.
• Partner closely with Product, Data Engineering, AI/ML, and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous business needs into technical roadmaps and production-ready solutions.
• Collaborate across engineering teams to reduce technical bottlenecks, improve platform capabilities, and accelerate delivery.
• Represent engineering in cross-functional planning discussions, helping shape technical strategy while influencing without formal authority.
• Mentor engineers through technical leadership, architectural guidance, design reviews, and thoughtful engineering practices.

Requirements

• 8+ years building scalable backend software, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure in production environments.
• Strong experience designing scalable, reliable backend architectures and making technical decisions around system design, performance, and maintainability.
• Strong programming experience in Python or another modern backend language (Java, Go, Scala, C++, etc.) with the ability to quickly become productive in Python.
• Experience building systems that process large volumes of data or high-throughput distributed workloads.
• Experience working in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred) and deploying distributed systems in production.
• Demonstrated ability to independently lead complex technical initiatives, influence architectural direction, and partner effectively across engineering and product organizations.
• Experience with Spark, Kafka, Hudi, Airflow, or other distributed data technologies is a plus—but we're equally interested in backend engineers with strong distributed systems experience who are excited to deepen their expertise in modern data engineering.

Compensation

This role pays $170,000 to $190,000 per year, based on experience, in addition to stock options.

Benefits

• Full suite of health insurance options, in addition to generous paid time off
• Pre-planned company-wide wellness holidays
• Retirement options
• Health & charitable donation stipends
• Impactful Business Resource Groups
• Flexible work hours & the opportunity to work from anywhere
• The opportunity to work with leading biotech and life sciences companies in an innovative industry with a mission to improve healthcare around the globe