Backend Software Engineer

New Lantern; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

New Lantern in San Francisco is building an AI radiology platform. We seek a backend software engineer to own a high‑performance server application for radiology image data, AI inference tasks, and medical report transmission.

You will ship reliable features with Python and Django, collaborate with radiologists and IT staff to refine requirements, and improve system reliability with automated tests and robust error handling. On‑call rotations are included.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience building high performance web applications in cloud environments.
• Strong Python experience with a Python web framework (Django preferred).
• Solid debugging and problem-solving skills with understanding of abstractions.
• Product engineering mindset with user-centric, iterative shipping.
• End-to-end ownership across design, implementation, testing, and monitoring.
• Experience using AI/LLM-based tools for developing software.

Responsibilities

• Take on end-to-end ownership for delivering a best-in-class radiology platform.
• Solve user problems by shipping reliable and efficient features using Python and Django.
• Collaborate with radiologists, clinical staff, and IT staff to discover requirements, build prototypes, and validate solutions.
• Improve application quality and reliability with pre-deployment automated testing, robust error handling, and graceful error recovery.
• Partner with frontend developers to ship new features and improve system performance and reliability.
• Participate in an on‑call rotation or customer support engineering rotation.

Skills

Python

Django

Web development

Cloud environments

Debugging

Product engineering mindset

LLM tools experience

Job description

New Lantern is building an AI radiology resident—think Cursor for radiologists. Our application integrates the three software tools radiologists use all day [1], together with AI, to create a platform that saves radiologists toil and lets them focus on reading images and finding disease.

This role

As a backend software engineer working on our radiology platform, you'll be responsible for building and maintaining a reliable, high performance server application that enables our product, including receiving and processing radiology image data, running LLM inference tasks to assist users, and transmitting completed medical reports, as well as providing all of the standard services needed by a modern web application.

What you’ll do

• Take on end-to-end ownership for delivering a best-in-class radiology platform.
• Solve user problems by shipping reliable and efficient features and improvements, often using Python and Django.
• Collaborate with radiologists, clinical staff, and IT staff to discover requirements, build prototypes, and validate solutions.
• Improve application quality and reliability with pre-deployment automated testing, robust error handling, and graceful error recovery.
• Partner with frontend developers to ship new features and improve overall system performance and reliability.
• Participate in an on‑call rotation or customer support engineering rotation.

You have

• 4+ years of progressive experience building and maintaining complex, high performance web applications running in cloud environments.
• Solid experience with Python and a Python web framework (ideally Django) as well as the supporting dev tools ecosystem.
• Well‑practiced debugging and problem‑solving skills, and a thorough understanding of the abstractions you typically build on top of.
• A product engineering mindset with a bias to talk to users frequently and ship iteratively.
• An end‑to‑end ownership mindset across design, implementation, testing, and monitoring.
• Experience using AI/LLM‑based tools for developing software and solving software problems (e.g. Claude Code/Cursor/Codex/Copilot/OpenCode/etc.).

Nice to haves

• Experience measuring and optimizing the performance of web applications and their database access patterns.
• Experience building and maintaining reliable LLM‑ or ML‑based products or systems, including evals, fine tuning, operations, and data engineering.
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure using Terraform or another infrastructure‑as‑code tool.
• Experience deploying and operating applications on Kubernetes or another container orchestration system.
• Experience with data modeling (and grappling with the consequences of poor data modeling decisions).
• Experience building and operating production data processing pipelines.
• Deep experience in the Python ecosystem (e.g. package maintainer/contributor, etc.)
• Systems programming & administration experience (networking, linux/POSIX, concurrency, filesystems, memory management, etc.)
• Full‑stack experience, ideally with Typescript/React.
• Familiarity with radiology, medical imaging, or related fields.

[1] a radiology image archive & viewer, a medical report dictation system, and work management system