Senior Platform Engineer (x/f/m) - Backend Platform

Alan; France; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly? (not specified)

Job summary

Alan is building the backend platform and is hiring for a senior backend engineer. You will own building blocks used by all Alan products and help shift the monolith toward scalable services. The role focuses on events, data replication, and a shared runtime in a fast-growing, multinational engineering team.

The team is small and growing: 3 engineers today, 6 next year. You will help define backend direction, patterns, and ownership across France as we scale to more countries.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering, with code other teams depend on.
• Distributed systems as a daily tool: events and messaging, data replication, transactions.
• PostgreSQL in depth: transactions, locks, replication, query plans.
• Experience splitting a monolith or building services while production runs.
• You measure before you optimise, set SLOs and alerts.

Responsibilities

• Own the backend building blocks every Alan product depends on.
• Develop and evolve the events pipeline and data replication between services.
• Move from a monolith to big services with clear playbooks.
• Define the shared runtime: queues, cache, and transaction layer.
• Write backend rules and guidelines in collaboration with other teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

Data replication

Service-oriented architecture

Tools

Python

Flask

SQLAlchemy

PostgreSQL

Redis

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 1000+ 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 value

• 5+ 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 plus

you worked in a platform team that served product teams

• event-driven architecture at scale
• CDC or logical replication
• async Python (asyncio, Fast