Senior/Staff Back-End Engineer (Copy) (Copy)

Helm Health

21h•$180,000 - $225,000•Remote

About The Position

Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that allows members to see simple upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care. Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join! We're seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to lead our infrastructure and platform engineering function, reporting directly to the CTO. You'll partner with the CTO to define infrastructure strategy and then own its implementation, operations, and ongoing evolution. You'll serve as team lead for our Infrastructure team and bear ultimate responsibility for the reliability, security, and performance of our production systems around the clock. You'll be building the Infrastructure team. Today, infrastructure responsibilities are distributed across the engineering org. You'll consolidate that into a cohesive function, starting with a Senior Backend Engineer as your first direct report, and help guide the team's growth from there. You'll work closely with every engineering team to ensure our platform is reliable, secure, and scalable.

Requirements

8+ years in infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE roles
Deep expertise with Google Cloud Platform
Experience building and running multi-regional services and data stores
Strong Terraform/Terraform Cloud experience — you think in infrastructure-as-code by default
Extensive experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production
Hands-on experience managing and scaling relational and NoSQL databases at production scale
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD systems, monitoring/observability stacks, and incident response processes
Track record of maintaining high-availability production systems with demanding uptime requirements
Experience leading or mentoring engineers
Experience with disaster recovery planning and runbook creation

Nice To Haves

Healthcare infrastructure experience — HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST
Python proficiency
Incident management tooling (incident.io or similar)
Cost optimization and FinOps experience on GCP
Startup experience

Responsibilities

Partner with the CTO to define infrastructure strategy and technical direction, then own implementation and day-to-day execution
Lead and grow the Infrastructure team, starting with one direct report and expanding over time
Ensure production systems meet stringent availability and performance requirements in a 24/7/365 environment
Design and operate multi-regional infrastructure and data stores for resilience and low-latency access
Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, and release management processes
Manage and scale our cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform, including compute, networking, storage, and managed database services
Own infrastructure-as-code with Terraform/Terraform Cloud across all environments
Implement and enforce security, compliance, and operational best practices (HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2)
Build monitoring, alerting, and observability systems to ensure production reliability
Manage and optimize database infrastructure across PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery, Bigtable, and Firestore
Own and lead incident response processes, including on-call rotation
Collaborate with engineering leadership to plan capacity, manage costs, and align infrastructure investments with business priorities
Experience with networking fundamentals, including DNS, load balancing, firewalls, VPCs, and service mesh or similar