Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Sidecar Health is redefining health insurance. Our mission is to make excellent healthcare affordable and accessible for everyone. We know that to accomplish this lofty mission, we need driven people who will make things happen.

The passionate people who make up Sidecar Health’s team come from all over, with backgrounds as tech leaders, policy makers, healthcare professionals, and beyond. And they all have one thing in common—the desire to fix a broken system and make it more personalized, affordable, and transparent.

If you want to use your talents to transform healthcare in the United States, come join us!

About the Role

This is a high-impact individual contributor role at the core of our backend engineering team, building the services, APIs, and data systems that power Sidecar Health's platform. You'll own complex, performance-critical systems end-to-end — from design through deployment — and make the architectural decisions that keep us fast and reliable as we scale. If you treat every feature like your name is on it and want to build things that matter in healthcare, this is the role for you.

**MUST BE BASED IN CALIFORNIA**

What You'll Do 

• Design, build, and own scalable backend services and APIs that handle complex healthcare data and workflows
• Optimize database queries and data models to ensure system performance and reliability at scale
• Evaluate and articulate technical tradeoffs across system design, performance, and maintainability
• Integrate AI tools and agentic coding patterns into backend workflows where they add real value
• Write clean, well-tested, production-grade code with a high bar for quality
• Partner with product, data, and cross-functional stakeholders to translate requirements into robust technical solutions
• Contribute to engineering standards through code reviews, technical discussion, and better defaults

What You'll Bring 

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong backend ownership of production systems
• Deep expertise in Java and/or Python
• Proven experience with system design and the ability to articulate tradeoffs between architectural approaches
• Solid fundamentals in testing, debugging, performance optimization, and code review
• Habitual, fluent use of AI tools (Claude, Cursor, etc.) as part of your daily workflow
• Comfortable owning cloud deployments, preferably on AWS (EC2, Lambda, RDS, S3)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices
• Familiarity with data engineering frameworks — Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, or Dagster — is a strong plus
• Experience building AI agents is a plus
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

The Reality

This is a startup. We move fast. We prioritize impact over polish. We expect:

• Bias for action — ship, learn, iterate
• Ownership — you design it, build it, run it
• Pragmatism — solve real problems, not theoretical ones
• Resilience — ambiguity comes with the territory

Healthcare is complex and broken. The work matters.

What You'll Get 

• Competitive salary, bonus opportunity, and equity package  
• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits
• A 401k retirement plan
• Paid vacation and company holidays
• Opportunity to make an impact at a rapidly growing mission-driven company transforming healthcare in the U.S.