Papa
Staff Backend Software Engineer - Community
San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) · Staff+
Sponsorship not specified$200k-$230kDetected 21 hours ago
PythonRubyElixirDistributed SystemsCode ReviewDevOpsAPI DevelopmentComplianceProduct StrategyHIPAAHL7/FHIREHR/EMRLeadershipCommunicationMentoringAdaptability
About the role
- You'll be our second engineer, working alongside another Staff Engineer and reporting directly to Papa Community's GM, with dotted-line mentorship from Papa core's engineering leadership.
- This is a rare chance to shape a platform from its earliest days without giving up the stability of an established company behind you.
- You'll leverage Papa's infrastructure while maintaining startup velocity.
Responsibilities
- Build the technical foundation for virtual care delivery.
- You'll help design and implement the core platform that connects our EHR, care management systems, billing infrastructure, and patient communication tools.
- You'll build the data infrastructure and tooling that allows our clinical team to make informed decisions, automate care workflows, and track patient outcomes in real-time.
- This includes everything from patient dashboards to automated patient outreach triggers to clinical decision support.
- Lead critical technical decisions. You'll evaluate build vs. buy trade-offs, recommend technology choices, and help architect solutions that balance immediate needs with long-term scalability. You'll partner with the GM to shape our technical roadmap.
- You'll help define code standards, testing expectations, deployment processes, and technical documentation practices as we grow the team - building the muscle for future engineering hires, not just following what's already there.
- A bias toward velocity - You want to ship, see it working, and iterate. You feel the urgency of building something that patients and clinicians depend on.
- Product mindset - You think like a founder, balancing technical excellence with business outcomes, revenue, and patient impact. You see gaps as opportunities and help define what we build, not just how.
- Strategic technical leadership - You lead large, complex projects with clear business impact. You influence senior leaders on engineering strategy and make compelling recommendations on build vs. buy decisions and strategic technical investments.
- High autonomy and ownership - You thrive in ambiguous environments, educate non-technical stakeholders, and own outcomes without needing detailed requirements or constant direction.
Requirements
- 9+ years of software development experience
- Expert-level proficiency in Ruby or Python
- 2+ years of hands-on, professional experience with Elixir
- Experience improving quality through thoughtful code reviews, appropriate testing, proper rollout, and monitoring
- You don't wait to be handed a fully-scoped task - you enjoy taking ownership of the problem itself and figuring out the right way to solve it.
- Deep backend expertise - Expert-level proficiency in Ruby or Python, with deep knowledge of distributed systems, API design, and building scalable architectures.
Nice to have
- Deeper Elixir expertise, including Phoenix LiveView
Compensation
- $200,000 - $230,000 (Actual compensation determined by candidate experience, location, education, certifications, and skill set).
Benefits
- Founded in 2017, Papa is backed by Canaan, Tiger Global Management, Comcast Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, TCG, Initialized Capital, and Seven Seven Six, among other revered institutional and individual investors.
- Meaningful equity package.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage; Health Savings Account (HSA) & Flexible Spending Account (FSA).
Company info
- Papa's culture is people-first.
- We encourage everyone to bring their whole authentic selves to work, to be transparent, non-hierarchical, and above all, to be
This listing is sourced directly from Papa's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.