Founding Infra Engineer

Joyful Health•New York City, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Joyful Health is building the financial operating system for healthcare, aiming to fix the financial chaos behind it. The current healthcare payment system is inefficient, leading to significant revenue loss for practices. Joyful Health's AI-powered system simplifies financial operations, allowing providers to focus on patient care. The company has secured $22M in Series A funding. This is a full-time role for an NYC-based individual open to a hybrid work model (3 days in office). The base pay range is $150,000–$275,000 per year. The role involves owning the foundation of the platform, including deployment architecture, service mesh, observability, and reliability. The platform handles large volumes of financial data, making stability, security, and scalability critical. The company emphasizes repeatable infrastructure and robust automation as differentiators. The founding Infra Engineer will design, build, and operate the core infrastructure to enable fast shipping, reliability, and seamless customer onboarding. This early-stage role offers the opportunity to shape architecture, engineering practices, and culture.

Requirements

Energized by Joyful Health’s mission —building tools that help providers take control of their financial health
Want to shape foundational architecture at an early-stage startup and influence technical decisions for years
Thrive in ambiguous environments and take pride in owning problems end-to-end
Value craftsmanship, reliability, and clean abstractions —infra that feels elegant, not duct-taped
5+ years of experience in Infra//SRE/platform engineering roles
Strong experience with Kubernetes (EKS or GKE preferred)
Strong experience with Python engineering workflows
Strong experience with CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar)
Strong experience with PostgreSQL performance, operations, and tuning
Strong experience with Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred)
Strong experience with Cloud networking, security, and IAM best practices

Responsibilities

Accelerate the entire engineering team by building novel tooling, automation, and proven infra best practices that dramatically increase development velocity
Design and maintain high-leverage CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions) that make shipping safe, fast, and frustration-free
Own our Kubernetes-based platform end-to-end: architecture, deployment strategy, scaling, and overall reliability
Build a stable, automated infrastructure layer around our Python services, ingestion pipelines, and compute workloads
Implement robust observability (metrics, logs, tracing) and build a clean operational picture of system health
Establish strong security foundations: secrets management, IAM hardening, system-level policies, and compliance-friendly patterns
Improve and optimize PostgreSQL performance, monitoring, and operational stability across workloads
Drive the team’s infrastructure roadmap and ensure our architecture supports rapid onboarding and growth
Build internal tooling that reduces complexity, eliminates manual ops, and gives engineers “superpowers”
Collaborate closely with engineering and product to ensure that infra choices enable—not constrain—our product velocity