Staff Back-End Engineer: Search APIs

About the Position

Helm Health is actively hiring a Staff Back-End Engineer: Search APIs to join our innovative team. As a key player, you will lead the technical direction for our public gRPC APIs and SDKs, shaping the future of healthcare technology.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical direction, implementation, and production support for the client-facing gRPC APIs and SDKs powering provider search, ranking, and dynamic copay lookups.
• Drive public API design decisions that hold up over years, not just sprints: versioning, backward compatibility, field masks, CEL-based filtering, error semantics, and gRPC status code conventions.
• Design and evolve the ranking and steerage logic that decides which providers and specialties surface first, balancing relevance, network status, cost, client overrides, and plan-specific incentives.
• Design for scale and reliability under real production load: geofenced queries, rate limiting, retry and timeout budgets, and graceful degradation when upstream dependencies are slow or unavailable.
• Partner with product and partner engineering teams to shape the external SDK and developer experience, projects, and roadmap.

Requirements

• 8+ years building backend services and distributed systems.
• Deep experience with search systems and architecture at scale.
• Experience across multiple search architectures & paradigms.
• A track record shipping public APIs and SDKs: versioning, backward compatibility, and multi-language client libraries.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical lead.
• Experience running GCP data infrastructure at scale.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience with provider search, clinical/specialty matching, network steerage, or benefits/copay logic in a healthcare or insurance context.
• Familiarity with geospatial query patterns at scale.
• Experience building retrieval evaluation frameworks.
• Experience in Go, with real gRPC and protobuf experience in production.
• Terraform/Terraform Cloud
• Start-up experience

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $150,000 - $225,000
• Bonus + equity
• Unlimited PTO (mandatory 12 days)
• Computer + home office stipend
• 401(k) + matching
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Autonomy and tons of room for career growth

About the Company

Helm Health

Helm Health is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that lets members see simple, upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care.

Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join!

Founders

• Olivia Cameron, Chief Product Officer
• Ross Klosterman
• Brodie Stone, Chief Commercial Officer

Perks

• Healthcare benefits
• 401k with Company match
• Parental leave
• Equity benefits
• Remote friendly
• Generous vacation

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