Software Engineer (Contract)

Sandbar Health is building a new health plan and concierge care platform that aims to transform healthcare into an enjoyable consumer experience. They are seeking a Software Engineer to work alongside the founders in a founding engineer capacity, focusing on taking their product from 0 to 1 across various engineering domains including frontend, backend, systems, compliance, and applied AI.

Responsibilities:

• Own a product area end to end. Take a meaningful slice of the product from idea to production and keep owning it — design it, build it, ship it, and improve it in the real world, working directly with the founders
• Build things people actually want to use. Create member and broker experiences that remove friction from the healthcare system, on top of services and infrastructure that stay scalable, secure, performant, and compliant
• Make the hard calls under constraints. Move fast without sacrificing correctness, and weigh user experience against technical and regulatory limits — the stakes are higher when you're handling patient data
• Set the foundation. Establish the architecture, patterns, and engineering habits an early team will build on for years
• Ship and stand behind it. Own the reliability, debugging, and iteration of what you put into production

Requirements:

• You've built and scaled production systems end to end, and can point to ones you owned
• You can turn fuzzy user and business problems into clear technical designs, and make sound tradeoffs between user experience, technical constraints, and regulatory constraints
• You operate well as a founding engineer: high agency, comfortable taking something from 0 to 1 with little scaffolding
• You have real product judgment — you can tell the difference between 'it works' and 'it's actually good to use.'
• You communicate clearly and directly, in writing and with non-engineers, and work well async on a small team
• Experience wiring LLM APIs into real features is a plus
• Direct HIPAA or SOC 2 experience, or familiarity with claims or clinical data, is a plus
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or AI agents — eval frameworks, RAG, or prompt engineering
• Experience designing evals or otherwise measuring AI quality is a real plus, especially since 'correct' in healthcare isn't always black and white