Lead Backend Platform Engineer

Lead Backend Platform EngineerMenlo Park CAEngineering /Full-time /Hybridapply for this job About January AI At January AI, we believe every day is January 1st — a fresh start for better health. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, January AI is the first AI-powered precision health company focused on improving metabolic health and advancing personalized nutrition. Co-founded by tech executive Noosheen Hashemi and Stanford geneticist Dr. Michael Snyder, we bring together machine learning, multi-omic science, and real-world health data to empower individuals to take control of their health. Our flagship January app uses data from continuous glucose monitors, wearables, and food logs to predict users’ blood sugar responses to more than 54 million foods, delivering real-time, personalized recommendations for nutrition, activity, and lifestyle. In 2025, we introduced Mirror, which integrates genomics, wearable data, and at-home diagnostics to offer clinical-grade guidance—supporting both individuals and enterprise health partners with tailored insights and actions. Recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies (2025, Wellness), a CES Innovation Honoree (2025), and one of Inc.’s Best in Business (2024), January AI is backed by visionary investors including Marc Benioff, Jerry Yang, and Steve Chen. Our work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, STAT, Financial Times, and TechCrunch. About the role We are hiring a Lead Backend Platform Engineer to own and strengthen a broad backend surface area spanning app APIs, partner APIs, EHR integrations, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and observability. What you’ll do Own backend services that power our app and partner-facing products Lead design, implementation, and maintenance of APIs, microservices, EHR integration layer and service-to-service workflows Manage the AI infrastructure that powers our health intelligence and evaluation harness Improve production reliability, observability, alerting, incident response, and debugging workflows Drive architectural improvements that simplify service boundaries and reduce operational fragility Improve the quality, consistency, and maintainability of backend systems across the stack Partner closely with product, frontend, and AI to deliver robust systems Help define and enforce strong engineering standards around service design, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational ownership Step into ambiguous, cross-functional problems and drive them to resolution with minimal oversight What success looks like Within 90 days, a new partner can integrate against our API in roughly a week with you as their primary technical contact. When a user-facing failure happens, you can localize the cause across ingestion, AI generation, and infrastructure and fix it without escalating. Prompt and pipeline changes ship behind a regression evaluation that catches quality drops before production. Auth, ingestion, and report incidents trend down because you've added the missing tracing, limits, and tests. The team has a stronger technical leader who communicates clearly, takes ownership, and raises the bar. What we’re looking for 7+ years of backend engineering experience in production environments Strong experience building and operating backend systems at scale Deep expertise in backend architecture, distributed systems, and microservices Excellent written and verbal communication Strong ownership mentality and the ability to proactively identify and solve problems Comfort operating as a lead and wearing multiple hats across software, infrastructure, reliability, and cross-functional execution Strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills A track record of improving engineering quality, not just delivering features A high level of care, accountability, and pride in your work Technical qualifications Strong backend development experience in languages relevant to our stack Experience...