Senior Platform Engineer (X/F/M) - Backend Platform

Alan; Barcelona; On-site; EUR 65,000 - 98,000; Full time

Job summary

Alan is hiring for a Backend Engineer to join the Backend Platform in Barcelona. You will own the backend building blocks that power Alan products, shaping async services and data flows for millions of users.

With 5+ years in backend development, you will design scalable Python systems, work with Flask, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Redis, and observability tools. English proficiency is required; French is a plus but not required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering in production.
• Experience with scalable Python services and async patterns.
• English working proficiency; French not required.

Responsibilities

• Own backend building blocks and drive scalable services.
• Lead events-driven architecture and service communication.
• Collaborate with product teams to ship reliable backends.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

Flask

SQLAlchemy

PostgreSQL

Redis

RQ

Datadog

Tools

Flask

SQLAlchemy

PostgreSQL

Redis

RQ

Datadog

Job description

Health can't wait . Not for symptoms to get worse. Not for a six? month appointment. Not for a system to catch up. But that's exactly how healthcare works today. You wait, until you can't.Alan exists to end the wait.Health is a universal right, and we believe this right can only become real when it's coupled with prevention. We need to stop treating health as something we repair and start treating it as something we build, every day. It's not solely a question of willpower. It's the healthcare system itself that needs to work for everyone, in a sustainable way.So we are building the new standard in prevention insurance. Alan is the first company that integrates insurance, prevention, and care into a single, acclaimed user experience.

We are on an incredible journey to build a global leading company, with a unique culture. We already partner with 40K+ companies of all sizes, serving more than 1M+ members, and have reached €800M+ in ARR.

Prevention as the new norm. That's what we're building with our team of ****+ people. If it speaks to you: we're hiring across France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. And beyond.

What you'll build and who you'll work with

Every Alan product, in every country, runs on the same backend: events, queues, cache, data shared between components, transactions. More than 200 engineers build on it every day. It carries more than 1 million members today. It must carry 10 million, in more countries, with more regulated health data.

You would join Backend Platform, a new team in our engineering organisation. Our job is to rethink the backend of a fully grown company, while it keeps running. Today almost everything runs in one Python monolith on one database. We are moving it towards big services that scale on their own, one pilot at a time. We build the tools that make this possible, and we set the rules for how Alan builds backends. This is a rare kind of project. The codebase serves real members and customers every day, and we have the mandate to change how it is built. What we decide now will shape how hundreds of engineers work for years. You will learn a lot, and your work will have a real impact.

The team is small and growing: 3 engineers today, 6 next year. Its mission:Own the backend building blocks every Alan product depends on, and make them simple enough that product teams use them without needing us.

Your scope

The events pipeline. How our components and services talk to each other asynchronously: a Postgres outbox, Redis Streams, an S3 archive. It is in production for about 20 components. You make it a product that teams use on their own. Data replication between services. A service publishes read-only tables. Other services keep a local, fresh copy and join on it. This replaces slow joins across components. Towards big services. The tools to take capabilities out of the monolith: a service template, APIs between services, traces across services, dependency management. We start with a pilot and turn it into a playbook. The shared runtime. Queues, cache, the transaction layer. Their limits, their SLOs, their headroom. The backend direction. The rules for how we build backends at Alan, written with the other engineering teams.

The stack

Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Redis, RQ, Datadog, all in a monorepo. New services are async-first. We deploy daily and believe in distributed ownership: you build it, you own it. You don't need prior Python experience.

Is it you we're looking for?

Experience we value5+ years of backend engineering, with code other teams depend on: libraries, frameworks, pipelines, internal platforms. You ran it in production and owned it. Distributed systems as a daily tool: events and messaging (delivery guarantees, ordering, idempotence, retries), data replication, consistency, transactions. PostgreSQL in depth: transactions, locks, replication, query plans. You have split a monolith or built services, step by step, while production kept running. You measure before you optimise, and you set SLOs and alerts for what you own. English working proficiency. French is not required.

Mindset we value

Product mindset. Product teams are your customers. Adoption is how you measure success. Enabler. You build things others use on their own, instead of doing the work for them. You write to think and align. Short framing docs and decision records are how this team works with the rest of engineering. Influence without authority. You get other teams to change how they build, with no reporting line. Incremental. One pilot first, then the playbook. No big-bang rewrites. Strong plusyou worked in a platform team that served product teamsevent-driven architecture at scaleCDC or logical replicationasync Python (asyncio, Fast#J-*****-Ljbffr