Staff Backend Engineer

Plenful is a company dedicated to transforming healthcare operations through innovative technology. They are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and development of their backend systems, mentor engineers, and set technical direction across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Maintain and evolve our workflow orchestration system that runs across serverless and containerized environments, processing millions of tasks each month
• Design scheduling, queuing, rate limiting, and retry logic for reliable and fair resource allocation
• Build mechanisms for state tracking, error handling, timeouts, and cleanup across distributed tasks
• Partner with DevOps on observability, structured logging, tracing, and deployment automation
• Design and optimize schemas for flexible data storage and user-defined structures
• Improve performance across large datasets (100M+ rows) using indexing, replication, and connection pooling
• Ensure ACID compliance, concurrency control, and referential integrity
• Implement audit logging, data lineage tracking, and compliant data retention policies
• Collaborate with DevOps on replication, backups, and disaster recovery
• Manage integrations with SFTP, email, databases, spreadsheets, and REST APIs, with secure credential and failure recovery handling
• Build and maintain file processing pipelines that handle millions of files per month
• Work with healthcare data formats (HL7, X12, EDI) and standard file types (PDF, Excel, CSV, JSON)
• Develop webhook handlers, polling services, and event-driven workflows to ensure data consistency
• Collaborate with ML/AI teams on data pipelines for model training and inference
• Lead technical projects and set quality and reliability standards for the backend team
• Identify and reduce technical debt; plan and execute major system improvements and migrations
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and pair programming
• Participate in incident response and postmortems, focusing on long-term reliability
• Write and review RFCs to document and guide key architectural decisions

Requirements:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong background in distributed systems, workflow orchestration, and large-scale task processing
• Advanced database expertise: SQL, schema design, query tuning, and operations at scale
• Solid computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, system design)
• Experience building and maintaining large-scale data pipelines and external integrations
• 3+ years of technical leadership, guiding projects and mentoring engineers
• Proven experience leading re-architecture or modernization efforts
• Track record of improving reliability, managing incidents, and reducing technical debt
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for documentation and cross-team collaboration
• Experience working closely with DevOps, observability, and ML/AI teams