Senior Backend/ Infrastructure Engineer

Thrive Mobile; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Thrive Mobile in New York is seeking a Senior Backend / Infrastructure Engineer to design and own the systems powering the member experience. The role requires 5 to 8+ years of experience in backend systems and strong API design skills.

You will collaborate with product, design, and operations teams, ensuring system reliability while enhancing healthcare access. Ideal candidates are data-driven, resourceful, and motivated to serve underserved communities.

Qualifications

• 5–8+ years of experience in backend systems.
• Strong API design in REST and event-driven architectures.
• Proficient in AWS services and cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and own production infrastructure on AWS.
• Collaborate with teams to turn goals into actionable roadmaps.
• Set standards for API design and observability.

Skills

API design fundamentals

AWS infrastructure

Postgres

Scrappy and resourceful

Data-driven problem solving

Tools

NestJS

Terraform

Snowflake

Job description

We are looking for a Senior Backend / Infrastructure Engineer who wants to own the systems that power Thrive's member experience end to end. This is a senior individual contributor role ideal for someone with 5 to 8+ years of experience who loves designing resilient APIs, integrating messy real-world systems, and owning production infrastructure on AWS.

You will partner with the Head of Engineering, product, design, and operations to translate company goals into scalable, reliable systems. As one of our first in-house senior engineers, you will help shape engineering practices, architecture, and the hiring bar as we grow.

This is a role for someone ready for meaningful scope, autonomy, and impact in a mission-driven company.

What You’ll Do

Build and ship

• Contribute hands‑on across our backend and infrastructure while establishing long‑term engineering foundations.
• Own development across our core backend technologies:
• Supabase, Postgres, and Snowflake for storage, APIs, and analytics workflows
• Integration layers with health plan partners, Auth0, Zoho CRM, Sanity CMS, and wireless provisioning systems
• Harden operational workflows currently running on low‑code tools (n8n, SQL scripts) into production services with proper observability, tests, and rollback paths.

Design and own

• Drive architecture for the systems behind our three strategic pillars: Data‑Driven Personalization at Scale, "Do It for Me" AI Enablement, and the Unified Member Hub.
• Lead end‑to‑end integrations across our vendor surface, including migrations when we outgrow a dependency.
• Author architecture decision records and runbooks as you go — we believe institutional knowledge belongs in the repo, not in people's heads.

Collaborate and execute

• Partner with product, design, and operations to turn goals into actionable roadmaps.
• Work alongside compliance and member experience to ensure we deliver secure, dependable service to members managing real health conditions on Medicaid and Medicare.
• Drive architectural decisions that balance innovation with a simple, maintainable, startup‑friendly stack.

Strategize and improve

• Set the bar for API design, testing discipline, observability, and on‑call practices as the team grows.
• Improve reliability, security, and developer workflows across our systems.
• Identify opportunities to streamline processes and ship features faster without compromising reliability.

About You

Experience and skills

• 5–8+ years building and owning production backend systems through design, launch, and the phase where the bill for early decisions comes due.
• Strong API design fundamentals — REST and event‑driven. You have opinions about versioning, idempotency, error shapes, pagination, and backward compatibility, and you can defend them without reaching for a framework's docs. Whether you've shipped it in NestJS, Express, Fastify, Go, or Rails matters less than whether the contracts you design hold up.
• Proficiency with:
• AWS infrastructure and cloud services (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, IAM)
• Postgres and Supabase for backend data storage and APIs
• Snowflake or similar cloud data warehousing platforms
• Integration experience — you've built against underdocumented vendor APIs, handled webhook retries in production, and know that "the docs say it returns JSON" is not a guarantee.
• Observability as a default, not a phase‑two — structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerts that page humans only when humans should be paged.
• Strong understanding of data modeling and data engineering concepts — you know when to normalize, when to denormalize, and why "just add a JSONB column" is sometimes right and often wrong.
• Nice to have: NestJS specifically (our current backend framework), Terraform or similar IaC, Sanity CMS, Auth0, healthcare or regulated‑data environments (HIPAA, SOC 2), experience deploying AI agents or LLM‑powered workflows.

Ways of working

• Ownership‑first mindset — you treat the systems you build as yours. You see it, you own it, you ship it.
• Ability to balance speed and long‑term architectural thinking — ship behind flags, plan the rollback, and don't stall deploys out of fear.
• Radical transparency and no hoarding — decisions, trade‑offs, and "I tried this and it didn't work" notes all belong in the repo.
• Data‑driven problem solver with strong reasoning and clarity in decision‑making.
• Excellent communicator with both technical and non‑technical teammates.

Traits we love

• Scrappy, resourceful, and motivated to build quickly.
• Curious, humble, and eager to learn.
• Passionate about serving underserved communities and improving healthcare access through technology.
• Member first, always — every technical decision gets filtered through the question: does this make a member's next interaction with us easier or harder?