Staff Backend Engineer — Ambient AI for Healthcare

Athelas; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Athelas is building a next-generation ambient AI platform for healthcare, handling long-form audio, real-time streams, and AI model orchestration. The Staff Backend Engineer will design robust distributed services across ingestion, processing, inference workflows, and storage, with strong emphasis on reliability, observability, and secure data handling.

You will collaborate with product and clinical teams to deliver production-ready workflows, tuning performance, latency, and resilience for

Qualifications

• Distributed-systems concepts: idempotency, consistency, concurrency, backpressure, retries, failure isolation, eventual completion
• Experience operating services in a cloud environment: deployment, monitoring, scaling, incident response
• Ownership mindset and bias for action: drive infrastructure work through completion
• 8+ years of professional backend or infrastructure engineering experience
• Experience designing APIs, service boundaries, and data models for complex workflows
• Experience with asynchronous processing, message queues, event-driven systems, or durable workflow execution
• Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, data, and dependencies
• Ability to reason about real-time and long-running workloads with different latency/durability needs
• Track record of improving reliability, observability, scalability, or operational efficiency
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, IaC, and cloud-native deployments
• Familiarity with observability tools: Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Sentry
• Experience defining SLOs, error budgets, alerts, and production incident response
• Experience building internal tooling for workflow inspection, replay, evaluation, or model debugging
• Experience with model routing, inference gateways, rate-limiting, batching, caching, or GPU workloads
• Experience with event-streaming/messaging systems: Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration systems like Temporal
• Experience orchestrating large language models or multi-model inference pipelines
• Experience building speech-to-text, diarization, transcription, or audio ML workflows

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend systems powering Ambient AI products across mobile and web
• Develop and evolve inference workflows coordinating transcription, diarization, LMs, clinical extraction, summarization
• Build orchestration for long-running, multi-stage workflows with scheduling, retries, timeouts, and dead-letter handling
• Ensure idempotency, replay, and safe workflow recovery
• Define model routing, versioning, and configuration; track progress and workflow state
• Establish strong observability with logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerts
• Lead incident response and post-incident analysis to drive improvements
• Collaborate with mobile, product, AI, security, and clinical teams to productionize capabilities
• Improve cloud infra, deployment, capacity planning, and tooling as platform scales

Job description

Athelas is building a next-generation ambient AI platform for healthcare, handling long-form audio, real-time streams, and AI model orchestration. The Staff Backend Engineer will design robust distributed services across ingestion, processing, inference workflows, and storage, with strong emphasis on reliability, observability, and secure data handling.

You will collaborate with product and clinical teams to deliver production-ready workflows, tuning performance, latency, and resilience for