Senior Founding Engineer, Platform

Alpaca Health • New York City, NY

2d

About The Position

Alpaca Health is building the operating system for autism care, designed to help clinicians start, run, and scale their own practices. The platform aims to eliminate the operational complexities that hinder patient care by providing a comprehensive solution for billing, payroll, scheduling, clinical documentation, and parent communication. The company has experienced rapid growth, achieving $2M in revenue within 8 months, securing a $10M Series A, and maintaining 30% month-over-month growth. The platform requires further development to support this expansion, and this role is crucial for maturing the platform's foundation.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in environments where correctness is critical (e.g., fintech, insurance, healthcare, logistics).
• Experience with implicit business rules, data models that don't match reality, or rushed migration processes.
• Ability to think in state machines before writing code.
• Preference for shipping correct code over shipping quickly.
• Senior-level technical decision-making ability, with a desire to implement those decisions in code.
• Experience building systems where data integrity is paramount.

Nice To Haves

• Shipped LLM features in production (RAG, evals, guardrails).
• Experience with event sourcing or ledger architectures.
• Healthcare or EHR experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform foundation, including data models, financial logic, state machines, API contracts, and AI infrastructure.
• Design and build core components, ensuring they are robust and maintainable.
• Develop strategies for schema migrations and ensure they run before features are deployed.
• Implement and enforce money invariants, including rate calculations, payout conditions, and payroll logic.
• Build lifecycle state machines for entities like patients, claims, and authorizations to prevent impossible states.
• Develop and maintain AI infrastructure for LLM-powered clinical workflows, ensuring reliability, auditability, and safety within a healthcare context.
• Own the technical aspects of security and HIPAA compliance, including access controls, audit logging, and encryption for handling Protected Health Information (PHI).
• Deploy, monitor, and maintain the production environment, responding to critical issues as needed.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed