Principal Backend Developer

About Happy Health Happy Health is revolutionizing sleep medicine delivery through our comprehensive telehealth platform. We've eliminated the traditional barriers to sleep care – no more waiting months for appointments or spending uncomfortable nights in sleep labs. Our patients receive FDA-cleared home sleep testing via Happy Ring, connect with board-certified sleep specialists, and when required, begin evidence-based treatment within just 5 days. Happy Ring represents the future of sleep diagnostics: an FDA-cleared medical device integrating advanced biometric sensors with AI-powered analysis to deliver clinical-grade accuracy in the home environment. For sleep medicine practitioners, this means you'll have access to high-quality diagnostic data that empowers you to make confident clinical decisions for your patients.

Overview

This position on the software team has direct ownership of and responsibility for the architecture, scalability, reliability, security, and long-term evolution of our backend infrastructure. As part of the software team behind the Happy Health product, you will help ensure that the integrated services and systems instrumental to the customer-facing experience (e.g. CRM, EHR, eComm, 3PL, etc.) are designed and operated to scale reliably. You will also help lead the design and implementation of internal tools used by technical and non-technical leaders and teams across the company. In addition to a primary role in hands-on engineering, this role will provide technical leadership across backend architecture, integration strategy, engineering standards, and platform decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and evolve a serverless backend stack in AWS, primarily utilizing Python 3.10+, Lambda, CDK, DynamoDB, Cloudfront, SNS, SQS, S3, and other related services to support customer-facing applications and internal operational workflows.
• Lead the design, implementation, and integration of our REST API, event processors, services, and underlying datastores that deliver meaningful data to and from customers resulting from their use of the Happy Ring.
• Establish and guide backend engineering best practices across system design, observability, reliability, performance, maintainability, and security.
• Provide technical leadership to other team members, contractors, and partners building on these systems.
• Drive architectural decisions and cross-functional technical alignment across software, mobile, web, eCommerce, operations, and partner-facing systems.
• Help ensure regulatory compliance and best practices are maintained across these systems and the mechanisms used to access them, including M2M authentication, authorization, and login workflows.
• Identify technical risks, scalability bottlenecks, and platform gaps early, and proactively drive solutions that support near-term commercial growth and long-term platform needs.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in backend software development
• 5+ years of experience in Python
• 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems in AWS
• Demonstrated experience designing scalable APIs, cloud infrastructure, and continuous integration workflows.
• Strong experience making technical tradeoffs across performance, reliability, security, and speed of execution
• Proven ability to lead technical design and influence engineering direction across multiple systems or teams

Preferred Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience working in the healthcare technology industry
• Experience working in regulated environments involving security, privacy, and compliance requirements
• Experience with serverless architecture at scale.
• Experience with GraphQL, OpenAPI, and client SDK generation tools.
• Experience integrating EHR, CRM, eCommerce, and logistics/3PL platforms.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and serving as a technical lead without direct people management responsibility

Collaboration You will directly collaborate with many members across the team and are expected to serve as a senior technical leader across backend systems and integrations. eCommerce: As one of the primary consumers and users of our APIs, you will work directly and regularly with technical and non-technical members of the eCommerce team to ensure that purchasing, 3PL, CRM, and EHR systems and workflows around the Happy Ring product are integrated seamlessly and designed to scale. Mobile: You will collaborate with the mobile engineering team to ensure the APIs used by our mobile apps and SDKs are properly designed, implemented, and maintained to meet the needs of mobile users. Partners: You will work with technical members of partner teams to understand, design, and develop APIs and integrations they can use to gather and interact with data generated through their use of the Happy Ring.

Work Environment

The team is remote, with a physical office in Austin, TX. Direct peers are distributed throughout the continental US. This role is expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy and leadership in a distributed environment.

Benefits

• 100% premium coverage for employee's Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance. 50% premium coverage for dependents.
• 401k platform
• Equity in company
• WFH Stipend

This is a highly strategic individual contributor role for a senior technical leader who can balance hands-on execution with long-term platform thinking. The right candidate should be comfortable operating in a fast-paced environment, making sound architectural decisions with incomplete information, and helping shape the backend foundation required for commercial scale.