Principal Engineer

Clinical ink; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Clinical Ink is seeking a skilled backend engineer to own platform architecture and drive production reliability. The role involves designing service boundaries and setting observability standards to ensure system performance and safety.

The ideal candidate should have extensive experience with backend technologies, particularly with Python, API design, and knowledge of health-regulatory standards. This position is a unique chance to impact healthcare software development and the team's efficiency through AI-augmented workflows.

Qualifications

• Deep backend engineering experience and ownership of architecture for non-trivial systems.
• Demonstrated ability to design distributed/service systems and API design.
• Owned production reliability and designed for observability.

Responsibilities

• Own the backend architecture and service boundaries.
• Set the observability and operability metrics.
• Drive significant change decisions and weigh their impacts.

Skills

Backend engineering experience with Python/FastAPI/SQLAlchemy/Postgres

API design

Production reliability

Technical writing

Deep understanding of health/regulated software

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Job description

Job Description

• Own the backend and platform architecture: service boundaries, the modular/domain-aligned design, data flow, tenant isolation, and the public API surface the mobile app and integrations depend on.
• Author and steward architecture and design records — intended-use statements, system/software requirements, ADRs — and keep them traceable through to verification. Make the architecture legible to everyone who builds on it.
• Own the infrastructure and production-reliability backbone: infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), the AWS runtime (ECS Fargate, RDS), CI/CD pipelines, and the security posture (secrets, IAM, least-privilege, HIPAA controls).
• Set the observability and operability bar: SLOs/SLIs and error budgets; metrics, traces, and logs (CloudWatch, Sentry, OpenTelemetry); actionable alerting; and a humane, well-designed on-call. Design systems to be operated, not just shipped.
• Drive the build‑vs‑buy and significant‑change decisions, and weigh each against phase impact (consumer → sponsor trials → SaMD).
• Set the bar for correctness and safety as design inputs: scoring parity across implementations, idempotency and retries in integrations, encryption and least‑privilege, and the controls that prove the code is right.
• Go deep where it matters — design and build the hardest backend pieces yourself (services, data contracts, third-party adapters), and review the rest.
• Multiply the team with AI‑augmented workflows: design the agentic patterns, skills, and guardrails the team uses to build faster without lowering the bar.
• Partner with the Director and regulatory/clinical stakeholders to turn product and compliance intent into a buildable, defensible technical plan.

Qualifications

• Deep backend engineering experience (we use Python / FastAPI / SQLAlchemy / Postgres on AWS; equivalent depth in another modern stack transfers) and a track record of owning architecture for a non‑trivial system.
• Demonstrated ability to design distributed/service systems: API design, data modeling, async/eventing, integration patterns (OAuth, webhooks, retries, idempotency).
• Owned production reliability for a real system — you’ve designed for observability, set SLOs, carried a pager, and made infrastructure/IaC calls (Terraform / AWS or equivalent). You treat “how it runs and how we know” as part of the architecture.
• A genuine drive to build and ship — you bias toward working software and measurable impact, and you bring others with you.
• Fluency with AI coding agents as part of how you work, plus the judgment to verify and own what they produce.
• Clear technical writing — you make complex systems understandable to engineers, clinicians, and executives alike.
• Health / regulated / safety‑critical software (SaMD, IEC 62304, ISO 14971, HIPAA, FDA pathways).
• Healthcare data and interoperability (FHIR, wearables — Withings / Polar / Whoop / Fitbit, Apple Health / Health Connect).
• Data/analytics at scale (Snowflake, dbt, de‑identification pipelines).
• Mobile‑adjacent experience (Flutter) or on‑device scoring.

Clinical Ink is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against otherwise qualified applicants on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, age, sex, marital status, national origin, disability or handicap, or veteran status.