Platform Engineer

Description

The company is building a health insurance business on software, aiming for the foundational infrastructure that future health plans will run on. Its goal is insurance that is affordable, adaptable, and scalable, and it is not a brokerage or a thin layer over AI.

Over 70% of employer-sponsored health plans are self-funded, so the employer takes on the insurer role and pays members' care costs directly. That gives firms room to shape benefits, become more flexible, and cut costs. Day-to-day administration, such as claims and benefit management, goes to a Third-Party Administrator (TPA).

The TPA market is a $500bn sector long treated as a service business, slowed by manual work and legacy systems. Even the team's own Macs could not open some of those systems.

The company is a vertically integrated, tech-enabled TPA that already serves thousands of employees. It helps new health plans launch with new ways to pay for and access insured care, with the aim of making a custom health plan as simple for any business to set up and run as a Shopify storefront.

The company is backed by top VC firms and is at Series A. Engineering headcount quadrupled last year and the team split into several teams. The platform group exists to keep building fast, easy, and safe as the company grows.

Responsibilities

• Build application code, cloud infrastructure, and internal tooling, working closely with the product teams that depend on them.
• Find and close gaps in performance, developer experience, and quality before they slow the company down.
• Design systems and build practices so they scale gracefully if claims volume or source control commits grow 100x.
• Provide safe defaults, clear interfaces, documentation, and observability so other engineers can extend what you build.
• Help teams choose between a quick fix for one team and a shared solution. Gather input, make tradeoffs visible, and set direction where no playbook exists. Make standards easy to follow.
• Start from a real bottleneck, build the smallest useful solution, and improve it with evidence.
• Work on prod-like data that contains no PHI, covering scrubbing, synthesis, restore, and development use, while balancing speed and fidelity.
• Design permissions and access controls across complex entity relationships, with privacy, auditability, and self-service team permissions. Keep checks fast, since they run on every request.
• Make the public API consistent for customers and for engineers, even though each product team owns only some of the endpoints.
• Find problems on your own, investigate, and deliver. Decide whether to handle something solo, escalate it, collaborate, or hand it to a better owner.
• Use AI to speed up your own work, and build CI that keeps quality steady as change accelerates.

Requirements

• You think like a product person and want to specialize in platform work.
• You are eager to learn unfamiliar systems, can spot where you can have impact, and share what you learn.
• You do not need prior experience in the industry, the tech stack, or a platform team.
• You can work without a dedicated product manager and direct yourself.
• Brownie points: you have been on call or otherwise owned a significant production system.
• Brownie points: you have scaled a system from small to large.
• Brownie points: you have worked on systems with real reliability, security, privacy, payments, or compliance requirements.
• Brownie points: you have worked at a large organization that needed cross-team coordination.
• Brownie points: you have worked at a startup whose engineering team grew well beyond its founders.

Conditions

Annual salary of $160k to $240k, plus a meaningful equity component that matches the level of the role at a Series A company in NY/SF.

The hiring process starts with a 30 minute initial conversation, followed by a take-home assignment similar to real work.

Next comes a 45 minute fit interview and then an onsite super-day.

The company may contact 1-2 references you provide.

Benefits

• Significant ownership, including equity and autonomy.
• Investment in your learning, with room to make mistakes along the way.
• Full transparency about the business.