Staff Backend Software Engineer - Community

Papa•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Papa is a new kind of care built on human connection. Across the country, health plans and employers look to Papa to provide vital social support by pairing older adults and families with Papa Pals, trained and vetted companions, who provide a helping hand and an open ear, resulting in less loneliness and better health. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Miami, Papa is backed by Canaan, Tiger Global Management, Comcast Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, TCG, Initialized Capital, and Seven Seven Six, among other revered institutional and individual investors. We envision a world where no one has to go it alone. Learn more at Papa.com. You'll be joining Papa Community, a 0-to-1 venture within Papa based in San Francisco that's building virtual care for seniors. You'll have the autonomy and velocity of an early-stage startup with the advantages of a growth-stage company including Papa's deep expertise serving older adults, established health plan relationships, and reliable capital. As one of the early team members on Community, you'll have a significant tangible impact to improve patient outcomes and drive scalability. Founded in 2017, Papa is backed by Canaan, Tiger Global Management, Comcast Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, TCG, Initialized Capital, and Seven Seven Six, among other revered institutional and individual investors. We envision a world where no one has to go it alone. Learn more at Papa.com. About the Role: We are expanding our founding engineering team and looking for a Staff Backend Software Engineer to join Papa Community and help build our technical foundation. You'll be our second engineer, working alongside another Staff Engineer and reporting directly to Papa Community's GM, with dotted-line mentorship from Papa core's engineering leadership. This is a rare chance to shape a platform from its earliest days without giving up the stability of an established company behind you. As Papa Community's engineering team grows, there will be more opportunities to take on broader technical leadership - this role is a chance to build that track record early, working shoulder-to-shoulder with our senior team members. This role is unique because: You'll help own the technical architecture for Papa Community. Unlike joining an established engineering org where you'd work on a narrow slice of the codebase, you'll make foundational decisions about system design, technology choices, and engineering practices that will define Community for years to come. You'll own problems, not tickets. You won't be handed a fully-scoped spec and asked to implement it - you'll be handed a problem the business is facing and given real latitude to figure out the best way to solve it. If what excites you is being trusted to figure out what to build and why, this is the role for you. You'll partner directly with the GM, much as a technical co-founder would. Your voice will shape product strategy, build vs. buy decisions, and business priorities. You'll leverage Papa's infrastructure while maintaining startup velocity. You can access Papa's deployment pipelines, security compliance, and DevOps support - but make decisions in days, not weeks, and ship at a pace that matches the urgency of the people we serve. You'll get institutional advantages without enterprise bureaucracy. What makes this role challenging: You'll navigate complex healthcare integrations. Our platform connects EHRs, care management platforms, revenue cycle management, and patient communication tools. You'll need deep expertise in healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7, X12) and resilient API integration patterns. You'll balance technical perfection with shipping velocity. We're a startup - sometimes the right answer is "ship it and iterate" rather than "architect the perfect solution." You'll need judgment to know when to build for scale and when to move fast, and a genuine bias for action. You'll work in a high-autonomy environmen t with a lot of open questions and comparatively little established process. You'll influence stakeholders, make recommendations, and own outcomes.

Requirements

9+ years of software development experience
Expert-level proficiency in Ruby or Python
2+ years of hands-on, professional 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

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 the technical foundation for virtual care delivery. You'll help design and implement the core platform that connects our EHR, care management systems, billing infrastructure, and patient communication tools. This means creating robust integrations, establishing data flows, and ensuring HIPAA-compliant architecture that can scale as we grow to thousands of patients.
Enable operational intelligence and automation. You'll build the data infrastructure and tooling that allows our clinical team to make informed decisions, automate care workflows, and track patient outcomes in real-time. This includes everything from patient dashboards to automated patient outreach triggers to clinical decision support.
Lead critical technical decisions. You'll evaluate build vs. buy trade-offs, recommend technology choices, and help architect solutions that balance immediate needs with long-term scalability. You'll partner with the GM to shape our technical roadmap.
Help establish engineering practices. You'll help define code standards, testing expectations, deployment processes, and technical documentation practices as we grow the team - building the muscle for future engineering hires, not just following what's already there.
Own system reliability and performance. You'll be responsible for production stability, monitoring, and continuous improvement of our platform. This means building resilient systems for healthcare-critical workflows where reliability isn't optional - claim submissions, patient data accuracy, and care coordination all need to work consistently.