Senior/Staff/Principal Backend Engineer, Platform & Data Ingestion

Verana Health; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 236,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% health, vision, and dental coverage

401K match

Flexible vacation plans

$700 learning and wellness annual stipend

Job summary

Verana Health in San Francisco is seeking a Senior/Staff/Principal Backend Engineer to scale their Oncology Platform. You will optimize data ingestion processes, implement OCR workflows, and design high-performance APIs.

The ideal candidate will have over 4 years of experience in backend development with strong skills in Scala or Java, alongside expertise in OpenSearch. This role directly influences patient care through efficient data management.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in building scalable, robust APIs and microservices.
• Strong programming experience with Scala, Elixir, Java, C#, or C++.
• Experience with OpenSearch for complex indexing and OCR pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Optimize data ingestion pipelines for clinical data processing.
• Implement OCR workflows for transforming raw clinical data.
• Design RESTful APIs and participate in code design reviews.

Skills

API development

ETL processes

Scala or Java

OpenSearch

SQL

Cloud integration

Job description

Senior/Staff/Principal Backend Engineer, Platform & Data Ingestion

Scale Clinical Platforms. Harness Unstructured Data. Advance Oncology Care.

You will report directly to the Senior Director of Engineering and work cross‑functionally within Verana Health's Oncology Platform, bridging our Core Engineering and Data Ingestion teams. In this role, you will have end‑to‑end, hands‑on ownership of the high‑throughput systems that transform complex, unstructured clinical text into scalable oncology data models.

Why This Role Matters

This position sits at a critical technical junction, connecting the frontline of Verana’s data ingestion engine with our foundational platform architecture. Within the Oncology Platform, your work directly impacts patient care by dictating how fast and how cleanly raw medical documentation is unlocked and structured to support life‑saving research and improving clinical outcomes.

By scaling OCR pipelines to extract clinical text and optimizing OpenSearch to make data instantly accessible, you will directly expand our core oncology data model. We also encourage thoughtful use of modern AI coding assistants and agentic tools, letting you spend less time on repetitive or basic tasks and more time building out the core architecture.

What You Get to Do

• Build and optimize resilient data ingestion pipelines that process high‑volume streams of clinical data and integrate them into our core oncology platform architecture.
• Own the indexing, querying, and performance tuning of our OpenSearch cluster to ensure fast text and data discovery across our oncology data layers.
• Implement and refine complex OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processing workflows to transform raw, unstructured patient timelines into clean, structured data.
• Expand our core oncology data model by maintaining and enhancing microservices that run automated, medically defined quality checks.
• Use AI tools to automate routine setup and boilerplate, keeping your day‑to‑day focus on building robust, high‑impact backend systems.
• Design and implement impactful ETL pipelines and high‑performance RESTful APIs/microservices.
• Participate in thorough code and design reviews, and guide technical decisions for system components while mentoring peer engineers.
• Lead the charge in investigating data and quality issues, getting into the weeds of the code to understand why things don’t work as expected, and then patching the problem.

Skills and Experience that Will Help You Succeed

• 4+ years of professional experience building scalable, robust APIs, microservices, and high‑volume ETL/ingestion processes.
• Strong professional experience with functional programming languages (Scala, Elixir) and/or mainstream typed languages (Java, C#, or C++).
• Demonstrated experience working with OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch) for complex indexing, alongside exposure to OCR pipelines, document parsing, or natural language text processing.
• 4+ years of experience with data modeling techniques for structured/unstructured datasets, strong SQL coding, and query optimization skills. Proven ability to design for and navigate both transactional (OLTP via Postgres, MySQL, etc.) and analytical (OLAP via Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.) data systems.
• Comfort using coding assistants, automated scripts, or agentic tools to streamline your daily development workflow and cut down on repetitive tasks.
• Deep understanding of distributed server‑side architectures, reactive principles, and cloud integrations (AWS and/or GCP), including messaging/streaming infrastructure (e.g., Amazon SQS, Kafka, and Google PubSub).
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a proven ability to collaborate cross‑functionally across multiple engineering and product teams.

Bonus Points (Optional)

• Real‑world experience with libraries within the Scala Typelevel ecosystem such as Cats, Shapeless, Circe, and Doobie.
• Willingness to occasionally work with reactive front‑end technologies (TypeScript, Angular, or React) to enhance internal project‑management user interfaces.
• Prior experience in healthcare technology, clinical data environments, or a deep passion for improving patient outcomes in healthcare.

Salary

• $150,000 – $236,000 (Geographic premium may apply)

Benefits

• 100 % health, vision, and dental coverage for employees
• 401 K match
• Flexible vacation plans
• $700 learning and wellness annual stipend

Final Note

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

You do not need to match every listed expectation to apply for this position. At Verana, we value diverse perspectives across backgrounds, experiences, and skills.