Software Engineer - Platform

PicnicHealth•San Francisco, CA

2h•Remote

About The Position

At PicnicHealth, we're building the future of non-interventional clinical research, powered by AI and centered on patients. Our mission is to make it radically easier, faster, and more affordable to perform clinical trials and get better treatments to patients. We're replacing the legacy, services-heavy model with a modern, AI-first approach that unlocks insights from rich, multi-modal data—from clinical notes and imaging to lab results—at scale. By engaging patients directly through our personal health assistant, PicnicAI, which meets them where they’re at and delights them along the way (with an industry leading NPS of 76), patients participate actively in the research they care about. PicnicHealth is already a trusted partner to 7 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies. Our work spans 40+ disease areas and has supported over 60 peer-reviewed publications, including an FDA submission that incorporates PicnicHealth data. Founded in 2014, we’ve raised $100M+ from top investors like Amplify Partners, Felicis Ventures, B Capital Group, and Y Combinator. Our business running non-interventional studies more than doubled last year, and we’re growing even faster in 2026. We’re a team of doctors, patients, data nerds, engineers, and builders, reimagining how clinical research works — and we’re just getting started! The Opportunity PicnicHealth's Platform team builds the infrastructure and developer tools that power our AI-driven clinical research platform. We're looking for engineers who combine strong infrastructure skills with product intuition—people who understand that great platform work isn't just about uptime and scale, but about accelerating the teams who ship features to patients, partners, and researchers. AI is transforming how we build and operate, and Platform is at the center of that shift. You'll ensure our infrastructure is ready for agentic workflows, help engineering teams adopt AI-assisted development practices, and build the foundations that make it all work safely at scale. You'll own critical systems end-to-end: from Kubernetes clusters and CI/CD pipelines to the sandbox environments that let our sales team demo new capabilities. If you're energized by making other engineers more productive while keeping a sharp eye on how your work ultimately impacts users, this role is for you. Our infrastructure runs on GCP (GKE, AlloyDB, BigQuery, Pub/Sub), Terraform, and Datadog—but we care more about your ability to learn and ship than checking every box. What is clinical research and why will PicnicHealth win? Clinical research is the industry responsible for conducting studies to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and treatments. Better trials lead to faster, more cost-effective drug development, ultimately resulting in more and improved treatments for patients. However, the process remains highly inefficient. Trials are a major bottleneck in drug development, and the promising advancements in biotech cannot translate to real patient impact unless clinical research becomes faster and more efficient The industry runs on outdated technology and manual processes. Research sites (hospitals, academic centers, doctors' offices) are overburdened and under-resourced. Contract research organizations (CROs), the organizations that traditionally run clinical trials for life sciences companies, typically throw hundreds-of-thousands of man-hours wrangling sites and cobbling together vendor software. PicnicHealth has built technology that uniquely positions us to run faster, cheaper, and more flexible studies while removing burden from sites: PicnicAI (trained on 350M+ clinician annotations over 100k+ patient records) is the only system that can effectively access and structure all participant EMR data trials need Our AI health assistant (NPS of 76 in 2024) guides participants through study activities and enables most to be done at home We're an integrated solution — virtual site, CRO, and software platform — with AI built in from the ground up, initially focusing on non-interventional research.

Requirements

Have 5+ years of practical experience as a fullstack or platform engineer building platform and infrastructure systems. You understand how applications work from the data layer to user experiences
Have worked in a startup or fast-moving environment, and have ideally built products from 0 to 1.
Take a product-focused approach to platform work, you care about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and easy for other engineers to use. You understand why you're building something, not just how.
Are comfortable diving into any part of the system, whether it's infrastructure, services, or product frontends, to deliver effective solutions.
Build & iterate fast, especially with AI. You're hands-on with AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or similar) and actively thinking about how to structure codebases and workflows for AI-assisted development.
You have opinions on how AI agents should interact with production systems—authentication, sandboxing, observability—and you're excited to build that foundation.
We expect all team members to be amazing in their roles and, ultimately, to move the PicnicHealth mission forward.

Benefits

We pay competitive salaries. Everyone on the team is an owner: all full time employees get competitive equity.
We’re a remote first company, with teammates spread across the US. We support in-person gatherings, including co-working spaces and multi-day onsites, to build connections and move forward strategic initiatives. Expect to travel 2-4 times a year. For our team members in the Bay Area, who prefer to work in person we can offer a hybrid set up to work from the SF office on a flexible schedule.
Comprehensive benefits including above market Health, Dental, Vision
Family friendly environment
Flexible time off
401k plan
Free PicnicHealth account
Equipment and internet funds for home office set up
Wellness Stipend
PicnicHealth is committed to promoting an inclusive work environment free of discrimination and harassment. We value a diverse and balanced team where everyone can belong.