Principal Backend Engineer (AI)

Location: Palo Alto, United States; hybrid with on-site work required three days per week

Salary: $230,000–$280,000 per year, plus equity and benefits

Company

hirify.global builds a generative AI healthcare SaaS platform providing AI governance guardrails, healthcare-specific agent creation, and real-time algorithm monitoring for health systems.

What you will do

• Define the long-term technical direction and architecture for core backend systems and services.
• Lead complex engineering initiatives across multiple teams, from early design through production operation.
• Design, implement, and review critical backend infrastructure components.
• Architect distributed systems, APIs, data services, and asynchronous workflows for enterprise workloads and integrations.
• Improve reliability, observability, performance, capacity planning, and operational efficiency.
• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers and establish technical standards and architectural practices.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience architecting, building, and operating complex large-scale backend or platform systems in production.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, data consistency, concurrency, fault tolerance, scalability, and performance optimization.
• Expert proficiency in at least one modern backend programming language and willingness to work extensively with Python.
• Experience designing and operating cloud-native applications on AWS, GCP, or Azure, including infrastructure automation and production operations.
• Strong knowledge of API design, data modeling, databases, asynchronous processing, and modern backend architecture.
• Ability to work on-site in the Palo Alto office three days per week.

Nice to have

• Experience with production generative AI applications, LLM-powered workflows, or AI infrastructure.
• Experience building multi-tenant enterprise SaaS platforms with strong security, isolation, scalability, and availability requirements.
• Experience with GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern monitoring and observability tooling.
• Experience in regulated environments such as healthcare or financial services.
• Familiarity with HIPAA, SOC 2, or comparable security and compliance frameworks.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven environment focused on applying AI to healthcare.
• Fast-growing organization with a focus on technical rigor, collaboration, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Competitive salary with equity eligibility.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Flexible working hours, hybrid work options, and an inclusive workplace.