Lead Backend Platform Engineer

Januaryinc; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity packages

401k with corporate matching

Health, dental, vision, life insurance

Commuter benefits

Job summary

January AI is seeking a Lead Backend Platform Engineer to own backend services that power app and partner products. This role demands expertise in backend architecture and distributed systems, focusing on API design and implementation, ensuring reliability and observability. You will work closely with the CTO and AI Lead, contributing to impactful AI solutions within a collaborative environment.

The position offers competitive salary packages, equity, and comprehensive health benefits. Join a team dedicated to enabling personalized metabolic health using AI-driven insights.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments.
• Strong experience building and operating backend systems at scale.
• Experience with monitoring, observability, and production operations.

Responsibilities

• Own backend services that power our app and partner-facing products.
• Lead design, implementation, and maintenance of APIs and microservices.
• Drive architectural improvements that simplify service boundaries.

Skills

Backend Engineering

Distributed Systems

Microservices

Problem-solving

Communication

Tools

PostgreSQL

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

About January AI

At January AI, we believe every day is January 1st — a fresh start for better health.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, January AI is the first AI‑powered precision health company focused on improving metabolic health and advancing personalized nutrition. Co‑co‑founded by tech executive Noosheen Hashemi and Stanford geneticist Dr. Michael Snyder, we bring together machine learning, multi‑omic science, and real‑world health data to empower individuals to take control of their health.

Our flagship January app uses data from continuous glucose monitors, wearables, and food logs to predict users’ blood sugar responses to more than 54 million foods, delivering real‑time, personalized recommendations for nutrition, activity, and lifestyle.

In 2025, we introduced Mirror, which integrates genomics, wearable data, and at‑home diagnostics to offer clinical‑grade guidance—supporting both individuals and enterprise health partners with tailored insights and actions.

Recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies (2025, Wellness), a CES Innovation Honoree (2025), and one of Inc.’s Best in Business (2024), January AI is backed by visionary investors including Marc Benioff, Jerry Yang, and Steve Chen. Our work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, STAT, Financial Times, and TechCrunch.

About the role

We are hiring a Lead Backend Platform Engineer to own and strengthen a broad backend surface area spanning app APIs, partner APIs, EHR integrations, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and observability.

What you’ll do

• Own backend services that power our app and partner‑facing products
• Lead design, implementation, and maintenance of APIs, microservices, EHR integration layer, and service‑to‑service workflows
• Manage the AI infrastructure that powers our health intelligence and evaluation harness
• Improve production reliability, observability, alerting, incident response, and debugging workflows
• Drive architectural improvements that simplify service boundaries and reduce operational fragility
• Improve the quality, consistency, and maintainability of backend systems across the stack
• Partner closely with product, frontend, and AI to deliver robust systems
• Help define and enforce strong engineering standards around service design, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational ownership
• Step into ambiguous, cross‑functional problems and drive them to resolution with minimal oversight

What success looks like

• Within 90 days, a new partner can integrate against our API in roughly a week with you as their primary technical contact.
• When a user‑facing failure happens, you can localize the cause across ingestion, AI generation, and infrastructure and fix it without escalating.
• Prompt and pipeline changes ship behind a regression evaluation that catches quality drops before production.
• Auth, ingestion, and report incidents trend down because you've added the missing tracing, limits, and tests.
• The team has a stronger technical leader who communicates clearly, takes ownership, and raises the bar.

What we’re looking for

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments
• Strong experience building and operating backend systems at scale
• Deep expertise in backend architecture, distributed systems, and microservices
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Strong ownership mentality and the ability to proactively identify and solve problems
• Comfort operating as a lead and wearing multiple hats across software, infrastructure, reliability, and cross‑functional execution
• Strong debugging and root‑cause analysis skills
• A track record of improving engineering quality, not just delivering features
• A high level of care, accountability, and pride in your work

Technical qualifications

• Strong backend development experience in languages relevant to our stack
• Experience designing and operating microservices, REST APIs, and event‑driven systems. Strong database skills, ideally with PostgreSQL.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure‑as‑code, especially Terraform
• Experience with CI/CD, deployment pipelines, and production operations
• Strong experience with monitoring, observability, tracing, logging, and alerting
• Experience handling incidents, production debugging, and post‑mortem‑driven improvement
• Hands‑on experience iterating prompts, retrieval, and evaluation in production — not just calling a model API
• Day‑to‑day fluency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) as part of your normal development loop

Nice to have

• Experience in healthcare or health‑tech. Familiarity with standards and healthcare data models such as FHIR and LOINC
• Experience supporting systems used by both internal product teams and external customers or partners

This person will report directly to the CTO and work very closely with our AI Lead. For the right person, this is an opportunity to have outsized impact: solving hard systems problems, improving the technical foundation of the company, and helping shape how January builds production‑grade AI products.

Why Join January AI

• Real ownership across the stack: You’ll own the systems that connect a person’s clinical and lifestyle data to AI‑generated insights — used by both our consumer app and the enterprise partners we serve.
• A team that can back the work: You’ll work alongside Stanford‑trained scientists, AI researchers, and operators who’ve shipped at scale, reporting to the CTO with the AI Lead as a close partner.
• Research‑credentialed product: Our clinical reasoning model has published benchmarks that hold up against the largest general‑purpose LLMs. We treat scientific credibility as a product requirement, not marketing.

Our HQ office is in sunny and beautiful downtown Menlo Park, CA, within walking distance to Caltrain and local cafes and restaurants.

Our team collaborates in real‑time during standard working hours Pacific Time.

Benefits and Perks of working Full‑time at January include: Competitive salary and equity packages; 401k with corporate matching; Health, dental, vision, life and AD&D insurance; Commuter benefits.