Lead Backend Platform Engineer

The team has a stronger technical leader who communicates clearly, takes ownership, and raises the bar. What we’re looking for 7+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments Strong experience building and operating backend systems at scale Deep expertise in backend architecture, distributed systems, and microservices Excellent written and verbal communication Strong ownership mentality and the ability to proactively identify and solve problems Comfort operating as a lead and wearing multiple hats across software, infrastructure, reliability, and cross-functional execution Strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills A track record of improving engineering quality, not just delivering features A high level of care, accountability, and pride in your work Technical

qualifications Strong backend development experience in languages relevant to our stack Experience designing and operating microservices, REST APIs, and event-driven systems. Strong database skills, ideally with PostgreSQL Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code, especially Terraform Experience with CI/CD, deployment pipelines, and production operations Strong experience with monitoring, observability, tracing, logging, and alerting Experience handling incidents, production debugging, and postmortem-driven improvement Hands-on experience iterating prompts, retrieval, and evaluation in production — not just calling a model API Day-to-day fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) as part of your normal development loop

Nice to have Experience in healthcare or health-tech. Familiarity with standards and healthcare data models such as FHIR and LOINC Experience supporting systems used by both internal product teams and external customers or partners This person will report directly to the CTO and work very closely with our AI Lead. For the right person, this is an opportunity to have outsized impact: solving hard systems problems, improving the technical foundation of the company, and helping shape how January builds production-grade AI products. \n $180,000 - $300,000 a year \n

Why Join January AI Real ownership across the stack: You'll own the systems that connect a person's clinical and lifestyle data to AI-generated insights — used by both our consumer app and the enterprise partners we serve. A team that can back the work: You'll work alongside Stanford-trained scientists, AI researchers, and operators who've shipped at scale, reporting to the CTO with the AI Lead as a close partner. Research-credentialed product: Our clinical reasoning model has published benchmarks that hold up against the largest general-purpose LLMs. We treat scientific credibility as a product requirement, not marketing. Our HQ office is in sunny and beautiful downtown Menlo Park, CA, within walking distance to Caltrain and local cafes and restaurants. Our team collaborates in real-time during standard working hours Pacific Time.

Benefits and

Perks of working Full-time at January include: Competitive salary and equity packages; 401k with corporate matching; Health, dental, vision, life and AD&D insurance; Commuter

benefits.

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