Founding Backend Engineer - Remote (AI for Mental Health)

Sarah Smith Fund; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity package

Flexible remote work

Health insurance

Professional development

Direct access to founders

Job summary

Soulside AI is hiring a Backend Engineer to build scalable systems that securely process sensitive healthcare data. You’ll work on real-time patient interactions, AI-driven tools, and end-to-end ownership of major features. Early engineering hire with significant architectural influence and equity upside.

You’ll shape the platform, collaborate with founders and clinical teams, and implement robust observability, security, and data reliability practices as the system scales.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Spring Boot framework and Java ecosystem for building production-grade applications.
• Proficiency in monitoring and observability tools, specifically Prometheus and Grafana for creating dashboards and alerts.
• Strong experience with AWS services including provisioning and managing auto-scaling policies, EC2, ECS/EKS.
• Proven expertise in architecting scalable distributed systems using message queues and streaming platforms (SQS, Kafka, Kinesis).
• Experience implementing data reliability patterns including redundancy, circuit breakers, retry mechanisms, and graceful failure handling.
• Hands-on experience with LLM technologies including prompt engineering, usage monitoring, and quality metrics.
• Strong security engineering background with Spring Security, implementing RBAC, and healthcare compliance standards.
• Experience with process modeling and translating complex domain workflows into backend logic.
• Demonstrated ability to build systems that handle asynchronous workloads at scale.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and microservices patterns.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop core backend services using Spring Boot that power our AI-driven platform.
• Design and implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability infrastructure using Prometheus and Grafana.
• Configure and manage AWS scaling policies to ensure system reliability and cost optimization.
• Build distributed systems leveraging message queues and streaming platforms (SQS, Kafka, Kinesis) for high-volume asynchronous workloads.
• Implement robust data reliability strategies including redundancy, failure handling, and disaster recovery.
• Design and optimize LLM integration pipelines, including prompt engineering, usage monitoring, and quality assurance.
• Establish security best practices using Spring Security, implement RBAC, and ensure HIPAA compliance.
• Model and optimize complex clinical and operational workflows, translating domain requirements into well-structured, maintainable backend processes.
• Make foundational technical decisions that will scale as we grow from startup to industry leader.
• Collaborate directly with founders and clinical teams to translate healthcare needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Own major product features end-to-end, from architecture to deployment.

Skills

Spring Boot

Java ecosystem

Monitoring

AWS

Distributed systems

LLM tooling

Security RBAC

Healthcare compliance

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

AWS (EC2/ECS/EKS)

Kafka

SQS

Kinesis

Spring Security

Job description

Soulside AI is hiring a Backend Engineer to build scalable systems that securely process sensitive healthcare data. You’ll work on real-time patient interactions, AI-driven tools, and end-to-end ownership of major features. Early engineering hire with significant architectural influence and equity upside.

You’ll shape the platform, collaborate with founders and clinical teams, and implement robust observability, security, and data reliability practices as the system scales.