Lead Architect/Engineer, Back End

Real Chemistry

1d•$175,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Real Chemistry, making the world a healthier place isn’t just an aspiration—it’s our everyday reality. Our drive to transform healthcare is informed by our blend of deep scientific expertise, human-centred creativity, and AI-driven insights, fostering a unique environment where innovation thrives and our people are impact-obsessed. As a global agency, we provide a full suite of services across healthcare communications and marketing to our clients, including top players in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Our #LifeatRealChem culture is rooted in our people—we believe we are best together and are committed to excellence for both our clients and colleagues. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your career, if you share our passion for healthcare and connection, we invite you to explore our opportunities. Discover your purpose. Embrace innovation. Experience #LifeatRealChem. Real Chemistry Media is transforming how medical and healthcare marketers engage healthcare professionals (HCPs) and consumers through data, technology, and omnichannel innovation. Real Chemistry Media's product and technology teams sit at the heart of this meaningful work by building tools that increase impact. In support of our mission to help life-changing medicines and therapies reach their full market potential, we are building an enterprise platform for omnichannel orchestration in healthcare marketing. Our technology enables healthcare organizations to design, deploy, and optimize HCP journeys through a scalable, self-service product that connects to their existing marketing and data systems. The platform is live with early users and on track with rapid growth milestones, so the decisions made over the next year will be influential in shaping the product's future. We are hiring a Lead Engineer, Back End to drive the services and data model that power the platform. You will lead back-end architecture and hands-on delivery, hire and grow a team of back-end and data engineers, and direct how the platform's data scales, stays reliable, and connects to the systems around it. The team is small and we're building a lot, so there are a lot of opportunities for ownership and influence.

Requirements

8+ years in back-end or full-stack engineering, including 2+ years leading a team.
Experience leading a data model and access patterns for a B2B or enterprise product at meaningful scale, ideally across both a relational and a NoSQL store.
Track record hiring and growing engineers, and running a technical interview loop from scratch.
Comfortable directing and reviewing agentic or AI-assisted coding, with the judgment to know what to hold to human review regardless of how the code was produced.
Experience partnering with data science or ML teams to get models into production.
Fluency defining and maintaining API contracts across a team boundary.
Comfort with ambiguity and a fast-moving, still-small engineering org.

Nice To Haves

Pharma or HCP marketing experience — or any complex, regulated marketing data environment (ad tech, financial services marketing, health systems).

Responsibilities

Lead the platform's application data model in Aurora and DynamoDB, and the access-pattern decisions behind it, as the product scales.
Drive the integration contract with our data warehouse — what flows each way, on what cadence — and keep the warehouse out of the platform's request path.
Define API contracts together with the front end lead, so the interface and the data model evolve as one system.
Direct the reliability, performance, and cost of back-end services, partnering with DevOps on the platform-level non-functional requirements that take both teams' input.
Partner with data science to productionize the models and recommendation features built on top of the platform's data.
Hire and lead a team of back-end and data engineers, setting a high bar for code quality and CI-enforced testing.
Support and set standards for agentic coding on your team, backed by real company investment in the tools, not just tolerance for their use.
Partner with product and design on problem definition, scope, and sequencing from the start of each effort.