Lead Backend/ML Engineer
Aware Healthcare
TL;DR: Fast-growing early-stage mental health tech startup seeking a senior engineer / tech lead (TL) to lead our backend and machine learning (ML) development, primarily using Node TypeScript, Express, and Python. You’ll be one of the first 10 employees at a fully-funded and commercially-flourishing startup. As engineer #4, you’ll be leading and building alongside of engineers #1-3. As Tech Lead, your career will grow with the company (the sky's the limit). Together, we'll reinvent therapy and change the mental health of millions. Details below!
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About Us:
Aware Healthcare is building the data infrastructure to scale world-class mental health therapy.
Every day, 100 million Americans struggle with a mental health issue, yet only 10% are receiving care based on science. That’s why we’re building a new mental health care system driven by data, where patients receive individualized care, clinicians deliver proven treatments, and insurance pays for outcomes not sessions.
While the rest of our industry is optimizing for quantity, we are laser focused on quality. Leveraging our data platform, we’ve landed contracts with all of the top 7 insurance companies, which unlocks access to 200M+ Americans and pays higher rates than any competitor.
We have raised $5.7mm from top executives at Google, PayPal, Lyft, and AirBnB and investors who previously funded Square, Instacart, Twilio, GrubHub, StitchFix, OpenDoor, and SpaceX. We were founded in 2020 by AJ Goldstein (previously early at Calm and Oura) and are based in San Francisco, CA. You can learn more about Aware here: https://www.awarehc.com/
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About the Role:
- Title: Lead Backend/ML Engineer
- Location: Remote
- Type: Full-Time
We’re looking for a seasoned full-stack web engineer to help build our backend and ML systems, to change the way therapy is delivered across the United States.
You’ll be building on top of our existing web/mobile application (which is currently being used by dozens of clinicians and hundreds of patients every week) using modern technologies like NodeJS, TypeScript, Express, and Python.
As one of the first 10 employees at our fully-funded and commercially-flourishing startup, you’ll build alongside our 3 existing full-time Founding Engineers, who are all full-stack generalists with previous early-stage startup experience.
This will be a senior role within the company, and a career-defining role for the right person.
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The Technical Challenge
We are building the largest digital dataset of an individual’s mental health using data from their personal IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, wearables, laptops, smart homes, connected cars).
To do this, we need to build scalable and reliable systems to ingest and process that data, and create innovative user experiences for therapists and patients to get better sooner.
100 million people are currently struggling with a mental health issue in the US alone. This is a problem with a huge scale, and even bigger engineering opportunity.
These are the 4 main challenges you and our other engineers will be tackling together:
- Data Engineering: Processing, structuring, and storing data from patients’ connected devices (e.g., smartphones & wearables), for use by data scientists to build models.
- Backend Engineering: Building APIs and data models to support our mobile/web apps.
- Machine Learning and Data Science: Building models on top of our data to suggest patient actions to our providers, and to measure data-driven outcomes for our patients.
- Security and Compliance: Ensuring Aware’s platform is HIPAA compliant, and securing very personal data with best-in-class data privacy protocols.
At this stage, we’re looking for a generalist, not a specialist. Someone ready to take a leadership role of our backend and ML development. You should be someone who is excited about the opportunity to have autonomy over mission-critical applications and take Aware’s experience and platform to the next level with your contributions.
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Responsibilities
You will…
- Lead backend and ML development alongside our existing 3 full-time engineers.
- Build on top of our existing backend systems, data infrastructure, and APIs.
- Own decisions about technologies and frameworks to use.
- Design ML models on top of our data to suggest patient actions to our providers, and to measure data-driven outcomes for our patients.
- Work with the frontend engineers to develop beautiful data visualizations for displaying patient biomarkers (e.g. sleep, movement, social connection, cognitive functioning)
- Build HIPAA-compliant backend systems for our patients and providers.
- Scale our APIs and platform as we onboard more patients and add more data.
- Contribute to not just our tech stack but also our process and culture, to enable the team to successfully execute and deliver
- Mentor existing engineers on the team
- Grow the team, from defining roles and interviewing, to helping close and onboard new team members
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Qualifications
Required:
- 5+ years of experience as a software engineer
- 2+ years of tech lead or engineering management experience, with a mix of both leadership and day-to-day coding
- 2+ years of experience building backends for high-traffic mobile and web applications
- 1+ years of experience with machine learning and data science in production
- Expertise with cloud services, e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure.
Preferred:
- Prior startup experience at a fast-growing, early-stage technology company.
- Experience with our stack of current technologies (below) is preferred, but NOT required.
- Love the experience of autonomy, mastery, and purpose that comes with joining a fast-moving startup.
- Some experience with frontend technologies like ReactJS and TypeScript to help build web applications and mobile web applications
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Our Stack
NOTE: We are flexible and open to changing our technologies as we grow. The technologies listed in the “Preferred” section (above) are what we’re using right now in our current MVP web application. We are not married to them in the long-term, and part of your job will be helping us set the direction moving forward.
Backend
- HTTP APIs - Express
- Application Database - PostgreSQL
- ORM - TypeORM (will migrate to Prisma)
- Data Platform Database - PostgreSQL (will upgrade to TimeScale)
- Infrastructure - Terraform (deprecating soon) and AWS
- TypeScript
ML
- Python
- PyTorch / TensorFlow
Mobile
- React Native
- Expo libraries
- Some native implementations for data collection:
- iOS - Swift
- Android - Kotlin
Web
- React Native (will migrate to either pure ReactJS or NextJS)
- ReactJS
- TypeScript
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Why Join Aware?
- Use your engineering skills for good and make a huge impact on the future of mental health.
- Work with an impressive roster of all-stars who have decades of experience building and scaling healthcare startups to IPO and $1b+ valuations.
- Shape the culture of a remote-first company that values you and supports your mental and physical wellbeing with 100% coverage of premium medical/dental/vision insurance and flexible time off policies.
- Join a well-funded startup with the stability to survive through the current tech downturn.
- Receive the financial upside and grow opportunities that come with being an early member of a rapidly growing startup.
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Company Values:
- Growth: We believe it is not where we are, but where we are headed, that matters. We are always improving and never complacent; eager to reflect on and learn from our mistakes.
- Relentlessness: We pride ourselves on persistence, creatively push the limits of what is possible, and ‘find a way no matter what’ long after others have given up.
- First Principles: We think from first principles, not by analogy. We curiously question and scientifically test assumptions to arrive at more creative solutions.
- Data Driven: We see numbers as a currency for trust. Whenever possible, we use numbers in place of words to create shared understanding and make objective decisions.
- Radical Candor: We embrace difficult conversations, communicate openly what we are thinking and feeling, and build trust through transparency with one another.
About the Founder:
AJ Goldstein is the Founder and CEO of Aware Healthcare. Prior to Aware, AJ founded and ran a six-figure profitable AI consulting group called Conscious Insights, where he helped grow 8 early-stage startups into leading digital health brands over 3 years, including Calm, Oura, and Akili (all $1B+ mental health companies). While running Conscious Insights, AJ founded and hosted a popular data science podcast called Data Journeys, where he interviewed 25 world class data scientists from 13 organizations with over $1B in annual revenue and grew a following of 50k+ in 128 countries. Motivated by his own personal experience with the problem, AJ has committed the next decade of his life to creating a new mental health care system with Aware. You can read AJ’s story behind Aware here: https://www.awarehc.com/founders-story
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If you’re interested in working with us, we’d love to hear from you! We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description.
At Aware, we know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Aware is an equal opportunity workplace. We are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.