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