Backend Software Engineer

newlantern; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

New Lantern is building an AI radiology resident and seeks a backend software engineer to own and evolve the core server application. You’ll handle image data intake, run LLM inference tasks, and deliver reliable report transmission while integrating standard web services.

Work with radiologists and IT staff, implement automated tests, improve error handling, and collaborate with frontend teams to boost performance.

Qualifications

• 4+ years building and maintaining complex, high-performance web apps in cloud environments
• Strong Python and Django experience with supporting dev tools ecosystem
• Experience using AI/LLM-based tools for developing software and solving software problems

Responsibilities

• Take on end-to-end ownership for delivering a best-in-class radiology platform
• Ship reliable and efficient features, often using Python and Django
• Collaborate with radiologists, clinical staff, and IT staff to discover requirements and validate solutions
• Improve application quality with automated testing, robust error handling, and graceful recovery
• Partner with frontend developers to ship new features and improve system performance
• Participate in on-call rotation or customer support engineering rotation

Skills

Python

Django

Cloud environments

Debugging

Product engineering mindset

End-to-end ownership

AI/LLM tools

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Git

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 infastructure-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