Staff Backend Software Engineer (Elixir) - Community
About The Position
Papa is building Papa Community, a new virtual care venture for seniors, operating with the agility of an early-stage startup while leveraging the resources of a growth-stage company. This role is for a Staff Backend Software Engineer to join the founding engineering team in San Francisco. The engineer will be instrumental in shaping the technical foundation, architecture, and engineering practices of the Papa Community platform. This position offers significant autonomy, allowing the engineer to own problems, influence product strategy, and make key technical decisions, similar to a technical co-founder. The role involves navigating complex healthcare integrations, balancing technical perfection with shipping velocity, and thriving in a high-autonomy environment with evolving processes. The engineer will build the core platform for virtual care delivery, enable operational intelligence and automation, lead critical technical decisions, help establish engineering practices, and own system reliability and performance.
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
- Genuine appetite for ambiguity and ownership
- Bias toward velocity
- Product mindset
- Strategic technical leadership
- Deep 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 the technical foundation for virtual care delivery, including designing and implementing the core platform that connects EHR, care management systems, billing infrastructure, and patient communication tools.
- Create robust integrations, establish data flows, and ensure HIPAA-compliant architecture that can scale.
- Enable operational intelligence and automation by building data infrastructure and tooling for clinical teams.
- Build patient dashboards, automated patient outreach triggers, and clinical decision support tools.
- Lead critical technical decisions, evaluating build vs. buy trade-offs, recommending technology choices, and architecting solutions for scalability.
- Partner with the GM to shape the technical roadmap.
- Help establish engineering practices, including code standards, testing expectations, deployment processes, and technical documentation.
- Own system reliability and performance, including production stability, monitoring, and continuous improvement of the platform.
- Build resilient systems for healthcare-critical workflows such as claim submissions, patient data accuracy, and care coordination.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage
- Health Savings Account (HSA) & Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
- 401(k) plan with a company matches up to 4%
- Flexible PTO
- 11 paid company holidays
- Parental leave
- Caregiver leave
- Meaningful equity package
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
