Staff Distributed Systems Engineer — Latency & Scale

Ambience; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

401(k) with company match

Remote-friendly culture with SF HQ

Job summary

Ambience is building a highly scalable real-time AI healthcare platform in San Francisco. You will own core backend systems, design multi-tenant data patterns, and optimize caching to reduce latency across critical workflows used by top health systems.

As a staff-level engineer, you’ll lead architecture decisions, mentor teammates, and shape infrastructure that clinicians rely on daily. This hybrid role requires in-person work in SF 3x per week.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software engineering, 3+ focused on infrastructure, backend systems, or platform engineering.
• Staff-level scope: owned cross‑cutting infrastructure, debugged production issues that stumped others.
• Strong backend fundamentals in Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar.
• In SF, 3x/week in‑person.

Responsibilities

• Database Architecture & Scaling — end-to-end performance, indexing, multi-tenant patterns.
• Caching & Latency Optimization — build caching to reduce EHR API latency in critical paths.
• Rate Limiting — design systems that respect API limits with graceful degradation.
• Reliability & Observability — dashboards and alerts for performance and reliability.

Skills

Python

Go

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

Caching

Performance optimization

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

Ambience is building a highly scalable real-time AI healthcare platform in San Francisco. You will own core backend systems, design multi-tenant data patterns, and optimize caching to reduce latency across critical workflows used by top health systems.

As a staff-level engineer, you’ll lead architecture decisions, mentor teammates, and shape infrastructure that clinicians rely on daily. This hybrid role requires in-person work in SF 3x per week.