Senior Backend Engineer (Community)

Papa•San Francisco, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Papa is building Papa Community, a 0-to-1 venture focused on virtual care for seniors. This role is for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join the founding engineering team in San Francisco. The position offers the autonomy of an early-stage startup with the stability of a growth-stage company. The engineer will have a significant impact on improving patient outcomes and driving scalability. The role involves extending the technical architecture, owning problems rather than just tickets, partnering directly with the GM, and leveraging Papa's infrastructure while maintaining startup velocity. The challenges include navigating complex healthcare integrations, balancing technical perfection with shipping velocity, and working in a high-autonomy environment with ambiguity. The engineer will build and scale Papa Community's proprietary platform, strengthen the revenue cycle management pipeline, extend platform and tooling investments (transactional email, customer support tooling), enable operational intelligence and automation (data infrastructure, dashboards, automated outreach), contribute to critical technical decisions (build vs. buy, roadmap), support engineering practices (code standards, testing, documentation), and own system reliability and performance for their areas of work. The ideal candidate has a genuine appetite for ambiguity and ownership, a bias toward velocity, a product mindset, independent ownership, strong backend expertise (Elixir preferred), system design and reliability skills, high autonomy, startup adaptability, and a continuous improvement mindset.

Requirements

6+ years of software development experience
Strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails or Python
1+ years of hands-on experience with Elixir
Experience building and shipping high quality work and achieving high reliability
Experience improving quality through thoughtful code reviews, appropriate testing, proper rollout, and monitoring
Passionate about improving healthcare access and outcomes
A genuine appetite for ambiguity and ownership
A bias toward velocity
Product mindset
Independent ownership
Strong backend expertise
System design and reliability
High autonomy and ownership
Startup adaptability
Continuous improvement mindset

Nice To Haves

Experience working as one of the first engineers at an early-stage startup, or otherwise building without an established engineering org around you
Deeper Elixir expertise, including Phoenix LiveView
Experience with healthcare technology including data standards (FHIR, HL7, X12), EHR/vendor integrations, HIPAA-compliant systems for protected health information, and healthcare-specific APIs (clearinghouses, billing platforms)

Responsibilities

Build out our platform, helping to build and scale Papa Community's proprietary platform.
Strengthen our revenue cycle management pipeline, working on ongoing integration and improvement of our RCM vendor relationship.
Extend our platform and tooling investments, helping to build out remaining platform needs.
Enable operational intelligence and automation, building the data infrastructure and tooling that allows our clinical team to make informed decisions.
Contribute to critical technical decisions, weighing in on build vs. buy trade-offs and technology choices.
Support engineering practices as we grow, helping to maintain code standards, testing expectations, deployment processes, and technical documentation practices.
Own system reliability and performance for the areas you build, building resilient systems for healthcare-critical workflows.