Tech Lead - Platform Engineer

Carbon Health; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private health insurance (employee)

Family health insurance

Remote-first arrangement

Salary in USD

Office access Ankara (ODTÜ Teknokent)

Floating vacation days

Permanent payroll employment

Job summary

Carbon Health is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to drive the technical direction of our core platform and foundational services in a healthcare setting. You will lead architectural decisions, own infrastructure as code with Terraform, and write code alongside the team.

The role is hands-on and requires experience with JVM languages, gRPC, and AWS microservices. You will mentor engineers and shape scalable, secure systems for patient care.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
• 2+ years in a technical leadership role.
• Strong experience with microservice architectures on AWS.
• Proficiency in at least one strongly typed JVM language (Java/Kotlin/Scala).
• Hands-on experience with gRPC and service-to-service design.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and queues.
• Relational databases, caching, and search data stores.
• Hands-on infrastructure management with Terraform.
• CI/CD pipeline development and maintenance.
• Production observability, incident response, and RCA experience.
• Ability to lead distributed teams and drive ownership.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical work on building and scaling Carbon Health's core platform and foundational services.
• Drive architectural decisions for highly available, scalable backend systems and document trade-offs.
• Shape service communication with gRPC contracts, timeouts, retries, and degradation strategies.
• Design event-driven workflows with idempotent consumers and Saga patterns.
• Own infrastructure as code with Terraform standards and reproducible environments.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines for safe, rapid production changes.
• Define SLAs/observability via metrics, logging, tracing, and alerts.
• Lead incident responses and blameless post-mortems for reliability.
• Guide data design across databases, caches, and search stores.
• Ensure security/compliance (access control, encryption, audit trails).
• Mentor engineers through reviews and pairing; promote ownership and continuous improvement.

Skills

Backend architecture

AWS microservices

Java/Kotlin/Scala

gRPC

Event-driven

Terraform

CI/CD

Observability

Incident response

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

About the role

We’re looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to drive the technical direction of Carbon Health’s core platform and foundational services: the backend systems, service-to-service communication, and infrastructure that every product team builds on.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role. You’ll set architectural direction, make pragmatic decisions about reliability and scale, and still write and review code alongside the team.

You’ll work in a JVM‑based microservices environment on AWS, in a healthcare setting where availability, data integrity, and security directly affect patient care.

What you’ll do

• Lead technical work on building and scaling Carbon Health’s core platform and foundational services.
• Drive architectural decisions for highly available, scalable backend systems, and document them so the whole team understands the trade‑offs.
• Shape how services talk to each other: gRPC contracts and their evolution, deadlines and timeout, retries with backoff, idempotency, and graceful degradation when a dependency fails.
• Design event‑driven and asynchronous workflows that stay consistent under failure, using patterns such as idempotent consumers, dead‑letter handling, Saga, and Transactional Outbox.
• Own the platform’s infrastructure as code: set Terraform standards and module structure, review infrastructure changes like application code, and keep environments reproducible.
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines so teams can ship small changes to production quickly and safely.
• Define service‑level objectives with the team and make services observable through metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, and actionable alerting.
• Lead incident response and blameless post‑mortems, and turn their findings into lasting reliability improvements.
• Guide data design across relational databases, caches, and search stores, keeping performance predictable as data grows.
• Make security and compliance part of the platform: access control, encryption, secrets management, and audit trails for sensitive healthcare data.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing, and provide technical leadership across backend and frontend domains.
• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and fast, reliable delivery.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
• 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership role.
• Strong experience with microservice architectures on AWS.
• Proficiency in at least one strongly typed JVM language, preferably Kotlin, Scala, or Java.
• Hands‑on experience with gRPC or a similar RPC framework, including contract design, timeouts, retries, and failure handling between services.
• Experience with event‑driven architecture and message queues, and with the delivery and consistency challenges that come with them.
• Solid experience with relational databases (schema design, indexing, query performance), plus caching and search data stores.
• Hands‑on experience managing infrastructure with Terraform.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience running services in production: observability, incident response, and root‑cause analysis.
• Ability to work as an independent technical leader, designing and delivering new capabilities with a distributed team.Professional working proficiency in English, both written and verbal.

Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare technology or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience with healthcare data standards such as HL7 or FHIR.
• Experience with resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, and rate limiting.
• Experience with stream processing or change data capture.
• Experience with containers and container orchestration.
• Experience reducing cloud costs or improving network and security posture at the platform level.
• A strong interest in using AI efficiently and responsibly in software development and engineering workflows.

What we offer

• Remote‑first, full‑time, permanent employment in Türkiye.
• Salary paid in USD, net.
• Payroll employment with the benefits of a permanent position.
• Access to our office at ODTÜ Teknokent, Ankara, with regular visits according to planned schedules.
• 100% private health insurance coverage for the employee.
• 50% private health insurance coverage for eligible family members, if you choose to include them.
• Floating vacation days: when a public holiday falls on a weekend, you can take the corresponding day off on a weekday of your choice, subject to applicable policies.
• The opportunity to shape the foundations of meaningful healthcare technology products with a collaborative engineering team.
• A culture that values ownership, continuous learning, and delivering high‑quality software.

Important

This is a full‑time, permanent payroll position in Türkiye. Candidates must have the right to work in Türkiye.