Staff Software Engineer

Kontakt.io; Kraków; Hybrid; PLN 300,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare

Equity

Multisport

Snack and lunch in the office

Job summary

Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience with Java/Kotlin.
• Experience as a technical lead or architect on a team.
• Proficient in OOP and functional programming paradigms.
• Proven experience architecting and operating container-based distributed systems in production.
• Fluent with AI-assisted development tools and processes.

Responsibilities

• Own technical direction for complex, ambiguous problems and translate goals into durable systems.
• Design and build APIs and services that are fast, scalable, and easy to integrate.
• Work with Kafka-based event-driven systems and ensure reliable integration with owning teams.
• Design and build frontend UIs and decide where logic belongs across the stack.
• Set the technical bar: lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and push back when shortcuts cost more later.
• Develop and deploy container-based applications with operability in mind.
• Collaborate with product, SRE, and other teams to ensure observability and debuggability around systems.
• Actively use AI tools as part of your workflow to improve speed and quality.

Skills

Java/Kotlin

Technical leadership

System architecture

AI-assisted development

OOP & Functional paradigms

Distributed systems

Tools

Kafka

Docker

Kubernetes

Event-driven systems

Job description

Inside health systems, where every second can matter, operations are still spread across dozens of disconnected tools and platforms. Kontakt.io is changing that.

We combine proprietary hardware, AI-powered intelligence, and deep integrations with the technology health systems already have in place to build real-time understanding of what's happening across their operations. That intelligence becomes the execution layer care teams have been missing, helping them make smarter decisions and deliver better patient care.

Backed by Goldman Sachs and trusted by leading health systems including HCA Healthcare, Sutter Health, AdventHealth, Trinity Health, Northwell Health, Cleveland Clinic, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, we've more than doubled our revenue and are rapidly scaling with a clear path toward $100M in annual recurring revenue.

If you're excited to solve hard problems and help health systems deliver better care, we'd love to meet you!

About the Role

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to be a technical anchor for one of our product teams — someone who can look at an ambiguous, gnarly problem and turn it into a system other engineers want to build on. This isn't a "senior-plus-more-years" role. You'll set technical direction, make build-vs-buy and architecture calls that outlast any single sprint, and raise the engineering bar for everyone around you — while still writing production code yourself.

You will operate with a lot of trust and a little bit of chaos: small team, real ownership, and the expectation that you'll propose the solution, not wait for someone to hand you a spec.

What You'll Do

• Own technical direction for complex, ambiguous problems — translating fuzzy product goals into systems that are simple to reason about and built to last
• Design and build APIs and services that are fast, scalable, and a pleasure for other engineers to integrate with
• Work as a consumer of our event-driven, Kafka-based systems — integrating with and building on top of them reliably, while partnering with the owning team on anything that touches the broader event architecture
• Design and build frontend UIs, and make sound calls about where logic belongs across the stack
• Set the technical bar: lead design reviews, mentor senior engineers, and push back — constructively — when a shortcut will cost more later
• Develop and deploy container-based applications, with an eye toward operability, not just "it works on my machine"
• Partner cross-functionally with product, SRE, and other engineering teams to make sure your systems are observable, supportable, and someone besides you can debug them at 2am
• Actively use AI tools (coding agents, LLM-assisted design, etc.) as part of your own workflow — not as a novelty, but as a real lever for speed and quality

What You Have

• 7+ years of engineering experience (Java/Kotlin), including time spent as a technical lead or de facto architect on a team
• Deep comfort with both OOP and functional paradigms, and the judgment to know when each is the right tool
• Proven experience architecting and operating container-based, distributed systems in production
• Genuine fluency with AI-assisted development tools — you've integrated them into how you actually build, debug, and design, not just experimented with them once
• A restless curiosity — you notice broken or missing things even when nobody assigned them to you, and you go fix them
• Comfort operating in a system with lots of moving parts and cross-team dependencies, without needing everything to be perfectly scoped before you act
• A track record of making other engineers better — through code review, design docs, or direct mentorship

Bonus Points If You Have

• Hands-on experience with event-sourced architectures (Kafka or similar) at meaningful scale
• Background in healthcare, or IoT, where "move fast" still has to mean "and don't break things that matter"
• Experience using AI/agentic tooling as part of your own engineering workflow, not just as a talking point
• Hybrid schedule — 2-3 days/week from our Kraków office, working alongside a small, high-caliber team
• Meaningful equity in a company scaling fast, with real customers and real revenue
• Full benefits: private healthcare, benefits platform, multisport, snack and lunch in the office
• Genuine autonomy — you'll ship things that matter, not sit in a backlog for two quarters