Senior/Staff Software Engineer

Lighten • San Mateo, CA

4h

About The Position

Lighten envisions a future where clinical data can drive the next generation of human health breakthroughs — from uncovering personalized treatment insights, to accelerating drug discoveries and driving adoption of innovative therapies. Lighten builds AI-native software platforms to transform raw clinical data into the highest quality patient journeys to accelerate evidence generation for R&D and bring life-saving therapies to the market faster. We partner with and empower life sciences and healthcare organizations to deliver on their mission for the benefit of the patients they serve.

Requirements

• A strong track record shipping production systems end-to-end
• Deep experience in at least one of backend/systems design, infrastructure, AI, or frontend, and the ability to go across all of them
• Backend / systems design: you design services and data models others build on, and you sweat the things that break under load, concurrency, consistency, failure modes (Python, Node.js, Go, or similar). Think: re-architecting a data pipeline to process 10x the volume, designing an API that a dozen teams depend on, or tracking down the race condition nobody else could.
• Infrastructure: you design and run AWS in production, not just use it, and you own scaling, security, cost, and reliability as code (ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC). Think: standing up infra-as-code from scratch, cutting cloud spend in half without downtime, or building CI/CD and observability the whole team leans on.
• AI: you ship LLM and agentic systems that actually hold up, treat quality as something you measure, and make the loop smarter from real usage. Think: building an eval harness that turns "it feels better" into a number, taking an agent from flaky demo to reliable in production, or wiring real usage back into the loop.
• Frontend: you own features end-to-end and build interfaces that feel effortless and stay solid on messy, real-world data (React/TypeScript or similar). Think: shipping a complex data-heavy view that stays fast, taming gnarly async state, or setting the component patterns everyone else builds on.
• Excellent judgment on trade-offs: you move fast without cutting the corners that matter
• Strong communication and the ability to work with non-engineering stakeholders (commercial, clinical, product)
• A commitment to clean architecture, readable code, and thorough testing, and a multiplier mindset that lifts the team

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship full stack features across our platform — from data pipelines and APIs to the frontend experiences
• Own and evolve our AWS infrastructure: provisioning, scaling, security, cost efficiency, and reliability for systems handling healthcare data
• Architect and implement agentic AI workflows that improve how users interact with real-world data
• Partner closely with product, data science, and commercial teams to translate healthcare domain requirements into robust technical solutions
• Establish and improve engineering practices — code review, testing, CI/CD, observability — as the team scales
• Make thoughtful architectural decisions with an eye toward data privacy, PHI handling, and compliance requirements inherent to healthcare data
• Mentor other engineers and help set technical direction as a senior technical voice on the team

Benefits

• competitive salary
• employee equity options
• 3% company-sponsored 401k contributions
• comprehensive medical, dental and vision insurance for employees and their families

What This Job Offers

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