Founding Backend Engineer

Hera•New York City, NY

40d•Onsite

About The Position

Hera is creating a new profession in healthcare called the Hero, a dedicated senior care expert for families. Heroes educate, coordinate, and advocate for vulnerable populations within the healthcare system. The company is building a platform to capture and leverage expertise from care managers to make healthcare navigation more accessible and intelligent. This role is for a founding backend software engineer who will build the core systems powering Hera's care platform with a focus on rigor, reliability, and scalability. The engineer will be responsible for designing and implementing infrastructure, services, and internal platform capabilities, ensuring fault-tolerant and idempotent systems, making critical data and infrastructure decisions, developing robust APIs, and raising the bar on engineering rigor.

Requirements

Strong backend and infrastructure fundamentals, with experience designing systems with sound architecture, strong performance, and long-term maintainability.
Attention to detail, caring deeply about correctness, resilience, and the details that matter when building systems that touch sensitive or high-stakes workflows.
Relevant systems experience, including experience with cloud infrastructure, multiple database types, consumer-scale APIs, SDKs, and service-oriented architecture.
Security and compliance awareness, with experience working with permissions, role-based access controls, security-sensitive flows, compliance-minded systems, or other trust-critical infrastructure being a major plus.
Ownership and autonomy, being self-directed, opinionated in a healthy way, and excited to take responsibility for major technical decisions as an early engineer.
Technical fluency, including AWS or similar cloud experience, SQL and non-SQL database experience, and strong comfort with modern backend development practices.

Responsibilities

Design and build core backend systems, architecting and implementing the infrastructure, services, and internal platform capabilities that underpin Hera’s product and operations.
Build for reliability and correctness, creating systems that are fault-tolerant, idempotent, and thoughtfully designed to handle sensitive workflows safely.
Own critical data and infrastructure decisions, helping to shape how Hera handles complex workflows involving medical, billing, operational, and user data across the platform.
Develop robust APIs and service architecture, building well-crafted consumer-grade APIs and contributing to a scalable, maintainable systems foundation.
Raise the bar on engineering rigor, bringing strong opinions around unit testing, system performance, design quality, and technical standards across the backend.