Staff Software Engineer

Paradigm Health is focused on rebuilding the clinical research ecosystem to provide equitable access to trials for all patients. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the Planning and Recruiting team, focusing on backend architecture while also contributing to frontend development, ensuring the systems are scalable and user-friendly.

Responsibilities:

• Architect the Backend Ecosystem: Define and evolve our backend architecture, including service boundaries, data modeling, API design (REST/GraphQL), and event-driven patterns. Drive decisions around scalability, performance, and reliability
• Drive Engineering Standards: Establish best practices across the stack, with a focus on backend quality (testing, observability, security), while ensuring frontend integrations are clean, maintainable, and performant
• Production & Observability: Own the lifecycle of services from development to production. Implement monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting to ensure system health and performance across backend and user-facing layers
• Shape the Product: Partner with Product Managers and Designers to translate complex clinical workflows—such as patient eligibility and trial matching—into scalable backend systems and well-designed user experiences
• Cross-Team Impact: Lead large cross-team initiatives, breaking down complex efforts into iterative deliverables that span backend services and frontend experiences
• Domain Expertise: Develop a deep understanding of the clinical trial ecosystem to design systems that solve real-world operational and data challenges
• Elevate the Team: Mentor engineers primarily on backend architecture and system design, while also supporting full-stack development best practices and collaboration
• Foster Collaboration: Ensure strong API contracts and data models that enable seamless integration with frontend systems. Act as a bridge between backend and frontend concerns when needed

Requirements:

• 10+ Years of Experience: You have experience building and scaling distributed systems, with comfort working across the stack when needed
• Backend-First Full Stack Engineer: Deep expertise in backend development (Java/Kotlin or similar), including APIs, data modeling, and distributed systems. You are also comfortable contributing to frontend applications (React/TypeScript) and understand how backend decisions impact user experience
• Systems Thinker: You design with the full system in mind—from database to API to UI—balancing performance, scalability, and usability
• Ops-Minded: You understand that development extends beyond implementation. You have experience with CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, observability, and operating services in production
• Product-First Technologist: You care about delivering reliable systems and cohesive user experiences that directly impact patients and providers
• Reliable Delivery: You get stuff done. You say what you will do, and do what you say, delivering high-quality work timely and reliably
• Ownership - Takes proactive lead into their work - say what you will do, and do that
• Growth Mindset - Believe in potential, embrace challenges, learn from mistakes
• Curious - you look at your work beyond the surface, and care about why and how things work
• Amplifies Others - Willing to learn from anyone and want to teach others
• Transparent - Provides effective feedback to reports, in code reviews, and shares information openly to build confidence