Staff Software Engineer

Promptly; Portugal; Remote; EUR 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual performance bonus

Equity compensation via ESOP

Annual training allowance

Private health insurance

Flexible work schedule and vacation

Job summary

Promptly is building a healthcare data platform for real-world evidence and AI-enabled workflows. We seek a Staff Software Engineer to shape the platform's technical foundation, lead architecture, and guide teams across backend, frontend, data integrations, and AI components.

You’ll work hands-on on tough problems, set engineering standards, and partner with product and leadership to deliver scalable, secure solutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering with production systems.
• Strong full-stack or backend-leaning fundamentals.
• Fluent with AI-assisted software development and tooling.
• Ability to guide AI-generated work with clear acceptance criteria.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical direction across products and critical systems.
• Design reliable, scalable, secure architectures for healthcare environments.
• Hands-on work in difficult or ambiguous code areas.
• Shape architecture across backends, frontends, APIs and data flows.
• Improve engineering standards with reviews, testing, observability.
• Mentor engineers and raise technical judgment across the team.

Skills

8+ years exp

Full-stack fundamentals

Backend design

AI-assisted development

Technical leadership

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Promptly is building the first patient-centered global evidence network, offering real world data sharing and monetization capabilities. Together with a selected network of Partners, we generate new knowledge from harmonized datasets, augmented with the collection of longitudinal patient-reported data and patient-generated digital biomarkers within a secure and privacy-preserving environment.

We answer the question – is this patient treatment the best it could possibly be?

What’s our purpose

We exist to empower every patient and every health organization on the planet with evidence on the outcomes of care!

Why do we get up in the morning? Well, most healthcare professionals have chosen to work in healthcare driven by their desire to make a difference in patients’ lives. And so have we! We have chosen to follow this calling by addressing the biggest problem in healthcare: the lack of real-world evidence on the outcomes of care.

For us, society denying patients better care due to lack of access to data is unethical, in a world where technology improved so many aspects of our world. Making the right evidence available to healthcare organizations to help prevent one lost life, one care complication, one failed treatment is the moral obligation that big tech companies have – it’s our Hippocratic Oath.

At Promptly, everything we do is driven by our core purpose: to promote better healthcare at lower costs for patients every day, by making health outcomes available.

About the role

Promptly is building healthcare data infrastructure for real-world evidence, patient-reported outcomes, and AI-enabled healthcare products. We work with sensitive, fragmented, and regulated data across hospitals, partners, patients, and life sciences organizations.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape and build the technical foundation of our platform as we scale.

This role is for an experienced technical leader who can operate across architecture, product, code, data, integrations, reliability, and AI-enabled workflows. You should be able to define technical direction, lead important engineering decisions, work across teams, and stay close enough to the code to understand the real trade-offs.

You should be comfortable working on ambiguous problems where the right answer is rarely "just build more software." Some problems need architecture. Some need a better product decision. Some need a migration path. Some need sharper engineering standards. Some need someone to sit with the team, understand the mess, and help move it forward.

What you’ll do

• Lead the technical direction of complex engineering initiatives across products, teams, or critical systems.
• Design and evolve systems that are reliable, secure, maintainable, and ready to scale across healthcare environments.
• Work hands-on in the codebase, especially in technically difficult or ambiguous areas.
• Shape architecture across backend systems, frontend applications, APIs, data flows, integrations, internal tooling, and AI-enabled product capabilities.
• Help teams make good technical trade-offs around speed, quality, reliability, privacy, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Improve engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, observability, testing practices, documentation, and operational discipline.
• Mentor engineers and help raise the level of technical judgment across the team.
• Partner with product, data, customer-facing, and leadership teams to turn healthcare and business needs into pragmatic technical solutions.
• Identify technical risks early and create realistic paths to reduce them.
• Help Promptly use AI well: in our products, in internal workflows, and in the way engineering teams build software.

How we build with AI

At Promptly, AI-assisted development is part of how we work. We expect engineers to use coding agents, copilots, code search, AI-assisted debugging, and automated review to move faster through real engineering work.

We expect engineers to use AI as part of a modern development workflow, with the same standards of craft, quality, and accountability we apply to any production system. Strong engineers know where AI accelerates the work, where it introduces risk, and where human judgment needs to lead.

You own what you ship. You should be able to explain the design, inspect the diff, validate the behavior, check the security and privacy implications, debug failures, and operate the system in production. If you cannot understand it, test it, secure it, and maintain it, you should not merge it.

What we’re looking for

Required

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with strong experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong full-stack or backend-leaning engineering fundamentals. You can design, write, review, and debug production-quality code.
• Deep fluency with AI-assisted software development. You use coding agents and AI tools as part of normal engineering work, not as a novelty.
• Strong ability to guide, constrain, and review AI-generated work. You know how to provide context, define acceptance criteria, keep changes reviewable, validate behavior, and reject plausible but wrong output.
• Experience using AI tools across the software lifecycle: codebase exploration, planning, implementation, refactoring, test generation, documentation, debugging, review, and operational investigation.
• Proven experience leading complex technical work across teams, systems, or product areas.
• Strong system design skills, including APIs, distributed systems, data flows, integrations, reliability, observability, performance, and security.
• Experience working with large or evolving codebases where maintainability, migration paths, and incremental delivery matter.
• Strong product judgment. You can connect technical decisions to user value, customer needs, and business outcomes.
• High agency in ambiguous environments. You can create clarity, make sensible trade-offs, and move work forward without waiting for perfect requirements.
• Strong ownership of production outcomes. You care about how systems behave after they ship.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can explain complex technical decisions to engineers, product managers, customer-facing teams, and leadership.
• A collaborative, low-ego working style. You help teams make better decisions without creating unnecessary process.

Preferred

• Experience in healthcare, health technology, life sciences, clinical data, real-world evidence, or another regulated enterprise domain.
• Experience with data-intensive platforms, interoperability, healthcare integrations, analytics products, or privacy-preserving data systems.
• Experience building or deploying AI/LLM-enabled workflows, agents, evaluation systems, or automation in production.
• Experience shaping AI-assisted engineering practices for a team, such as repository instructions, coding-agent workflows, review standards, test expectations, context management, safe automation, or production debugging workflows.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, Kafka, workflow systems, data pipelines, or distributed processing.
• Familiarity with security, privacy, compliance, and enterprise IT constraints.
• A track record of turning repeated engineering problems into better platforms, tooling, documentation, or reusable patterns.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical culture across teams.

You’ll be a strong fit if

• You like hard, real-world engineering problems.
• You care about craft, but you do not confuse craft with over-engineering.
• You can simplify complexity without ignoring risk.
• You know when to build, when to refactor, when to migrate, and when to stop.
• You are comfortable working with incomplete information.
• You already use AI tools to increase your engineering leverage.
• You know how to give agents enough context to be useful without outsourcing your judgment.
• You are not impressed by generated code just because it compiles.
• You care about healthcare, patient outcomes, and responsible data use.
• You want to help shape how a modern AI-era engineering organization works.

Position

• Remote-first
• Full-time

What we offer

Ownership & Growth

• Define and own a strategic global initiative from the ground up
• Shape the future of Promptly’s partner ecosystem and data network expansion
• Annual performance bonus
• Equity compensation via our ESOP (open to all team members)
• Annual training allowance
• Private health insurance
• Equal opportunity and inclusive environment
• Flexible work schedule and vacation policy
• Corporate events and international team gatherings

What is the recruiting process like

• Initial Interview — Meet your future manager and/or team members to get to know each other and understand the scope of the role.
• Technical & Strategic Assessment — Work on a short case related to partner management or program design.
• Final Interview (if needed) — Deep-dive discussion to align on expectations and vision.
• Offer Stage — We’ll share the offer and welcome you to the team!

Our Culture & Values

Empathy — Ownership — Responsibility — Teamwork — Excellence

If you embrace these values, you will thrive at Promptly. We are a purpose-driven company where everyone acts as an owner, committed to improving healthcare through data, technology, and collaboration.

Data Privacy

Your personal data will be processed for the purposes of managing Promptly’s recruitment related activities which includes setting up and conducting interviews and tests for applicants, assess and review such candidates and similar activities needed in the recruitment and hiring process. Your personal data will be shared with Proef, a provider engaged by Promptly to help us manage our recruitment and hiring process. For more information about how Promptly processes personal data and information about your rights etc., please see Promptly’s/ Proef’s Privacy Policy (link to: Policy for management of application (proef.com) ).

By submitting your application, you consent to Promptly/ Proef processing your personal data for recruitment purposes and to store such personal data for up to 12 months, unless we receive a request of erasure of the data from you to [e-mail] , in case Promptly would like to contact you regarding future job openings.

Privacy notice for applicants

Promptly - Software Solutions for Health Measures, S.A. (“Promptly”) is the controller of the personal data contained in your application. We process that data to manage our recruitment activities: reviewing applications, organising and conducting interviews, tests and assessments, evaluating candidates, communicating with you throughout the process and, where an offer is made, preparing your hiring. We do so on the basis of the steps taken at your request prior to entering into a contract, and of our legitimate interest in selecting suitable candidates for the role. Your data is accessible only to the members of the Promptly team involved in the selection process and to service providers that support the tools we use to manage it, acting on our instructions and bound by confidentiality and data protection obligations. We do not use your data for purposes unrelated to recruitment, we do not share it with third parties for their own purposes, and we do not take decisions about you based solely on automated processing.

If you are not selected, we keep your application for up to 12 months so that we may contact you about future openings that match your profile. You may ask us to delete it at any time, and we will do so.

You have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict and port your personal data, and to object to its processing. To exercise these rights, or to ask any question about how we handle your data, write to [e-mail] . You may also lodge a complaint with the Portuguese supervisory authority (Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados - CNPD).

By submitting this application, I confirm that the information provided by me, and in any documents attached to it, is true and complete to the best of my knowledge, and that I have not omitted any material fact. I confirm that I have disclosed any previous employment or engagement with Promptly. I accept that if any of the information provided is false or incorrect, my application may be rejected, any offer of employment may be withdrawn and, where employment has already begun, this may constitute grounds for disciplinary action, including termination, in accordance with applicable law.