Lead Backend Platform Engineer

January•Menlo Park, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

We are hiring a Lead Backend Platform Engineer to own and strengthen a broad backend surface area spanning app APIs, partner APIs, EHR integrations, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and observability. This role offers the opportunity to have an outsized impact by solving hard systems problems, improving the technical foundation of the company, and helping shape how January builds production-grade AI products. The position reports directly to the CTO and works closely with the AI Lead. The company is a precision health company focused on improving metabolic health and personalized nutrition, using AI, multi-omic science, and real-world health data. Their flagship app predicts users' blood sugar responses to foods and provides personalized recommendations. They also offer Mirror, which integrates genomics, wearable data, and diagnostics for clinical-grade guidance. January AI has been recognized by Fast Company, CES, and Inc., and is backed by notable investors.

Requirements

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
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 â€” 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 Haves

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

Responsibilities

Own backend services that power our app and partner-facing products
Lead design, implementation, and maintenance of APIs, microservices, EHR integration layer and service-to-service workflows
Manage the AI infrastructure that powers our health intelligence and evaluation harness
Improve production reliability, observability, alerting, incident response, and debugging workflows
Drive architectural improvements that simplify service boundaries and reduce operational fragility
Improve the quality, consistency, and maintainability of backend systems across the stack
Partner closely with product, frontend, and AI to deliver robust systems
Help define and enforce strong engineering standards around service design, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational ownership
Step into ambiguous, cross-functional problems and drive them to resolution with minimal oversight