Senior Backend / Infrastructure Engineer

About the Company

Incubated by Frist Cressey Ventures and backed by CVS Health Ventures, 25M Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Samsung Next and others, Thrive Mobile is the world's only wireless platform built for healthcare. Many Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries struggle with unreliable wireless service, frequent number changes, and limited data, all of which disrupt access to care. We partner with health plans and state governments to distribute a mobile service that includes an embedded engagement layer on the device itself. This allows members to stay connected, stay covered, and access important benefits and healthcare services without friction. Our mission is simple: build the mobile platform that makes healthcare easier.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend / Infrastructure Engineer who wants to own the systems that power Thrive's member experience end to end. This is a senior individual contributor role ideal for someone with 5 to 8+ years of experience who loves designing resilient APIs, integrating messy real-world systems, and owning production infrastructure on AWS.

You will own the backend architecture behind our member-facing mobile engagement layer, our web onboarding and BYOD enrollment flows, and the data and integration fabric that connects our health plan partners, wireless provisioning, and internal operations. Our stack includes a JavaScript/TypeScript backend deployed on AWS, a Next.js web platform, and a backend data layer built on Supabase, Snowflake, and Postgres. You will also help us deploy and integrate AI agents across our member experiences in pragmatic, member-first ways.

You will partner with the Head of Engineering, product, design, and operations to translate company goals into scalable, reliable systems. As one of our first in-house senior engineers, you will help shape engineering practices, architecture, and the hiring bar as we grow.

This is a role for someone ready for meaningful scope, autonomy, and impact in a mission-driven company.

What You'll Do

Build and ship

• Contribute hands-on across our backend and infrastructure while establishing long-term engineering foundations.
• Own development across our core backend technologies:
  • JavaScript/TypeScript services deployed on AWS (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway)
  • Supabase, Postgres, and Snowflake for storage, APIs, and analytics workflows
  • Integration layers with health plan partners, Auth0, Zoho CRM, Sanity CMS, and wireless provisioning systems
• Harden operational workflows currently running on low-code tools (n8n, SQL scripts) into production services with proper observability, tests, and rollback paths.

Design and own

• Drive architecture for the systems behind our three strategic pillars: Data-Driven Personalization at Scale, "Do It for Me" AI Enablement, and the Unified Member Hub.
• Lead end-to-end integrations across our vendor surface, including migrations when we outgrow a dependency.
• Author architecture decision records and runbooks as you go — we believe institutional knowledge belongs in the repo, not in people's heads.

Collaborate and execute

• Partner with product, design, and operations to turn goals into actionable roadmaps.
• Work alongside compliance and member experience to ensure we deliver secure, dependable service to members managing real health conditions on Medicaid and Medicare.
• Drive architectural decisions that balance innovation with a simple, maintainable, startup-friendly stack.

Strategize and improve

• Set the bar for API design, testing discipline, observability, and on-call practices as the team grows.
• Improve reliability, security, and developer workflows across our systems.
• Identify opportunities to streamline processes and ship features faster without compromising reliability.

About You

Experience and skills

• 5–8+ years building and owning production backend systems through design, launch, and the phase where the bill for early decisions comes due.
• Strong API design fundamentals — REST and event-driven. You have opinions about versioning, idempotency, error shapes, pagination, and backward compatibility, and you can defend them without reaching for a framework's docs. Whether you've shipped it in NestJS, Express, Fastify, Go, or Rails matters less than whether the contracts you design hold up.
• Proficiency with:
  • JavaScript/TypeScript, Python or Kotlin backend services
  • AWS infrastructure and cloud services (Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, IAM)
  • Postgres and Supabase for backend data storage and APIs
  • Snowflake or similar cloud data warehousing platforms
• Integration experience — you've built against underdocumented vendor APIs, handled webhook retries in production, and know that "the docs say it returns JSON" is not a guarantee.
• Observability as a default, not a phase-two — structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerts that page humans only when humans should be paged.
• Strong understanding of data modeling and data engineering concepts — you know when to normalize, when to denormalize, and why "just add a JSONB column" is sometimes right and often wrong.
• Nice to have: NestJS specifically (our current backend framework), Terraform or similar IaC, Sanity CMS, Auth0, healthcare or regulated-data environments (HIPAA, SOC 2), experience deploying AI agents or LLM-powered workflows.

Ways of working

• Ownership-first mindset — you treat the systems you build as yours. You see it, you own it, you ship it.
• Ability to balance speed and long-term architectural thinking — ship behind flags, plan the rollback, and don't stall deploys out of fear.
• Radical transparency and no hoarding — decisions, trade-offs, and "I tried this and it didn't work" notes all belong in the repo.
• Data-driven problem solver with strong reasoning and clarity in decision-making.
• Excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical teammates.

Traits we love

• Scrappy, resourceful, and motivated to build quickly.
• Curious, humble, and eager to learn.
• Passionate about serving underserved communities and improving healthcare access through technology.
• Member first, always — every technical decision gets filtered through the question: does this make a member's next interaction with us easier or harder?

Compensation & Benefits

$175,000–$200,000 base + performance bonus (up to 10%) + meaningful equity

• Standardized salaries based on position, no matter where you live
• Incentive Stock Options aligned to salary, role and impact
• Hybrid work options in New York, NY
• Thrive Mobile Mission Days: 4x per year we individually take a full day away from the office to connect with the Thrive mission
• $2,000 annual learning & development budget
• Unlimited vacation and sick days
• $1,000 yearly vacation bonus for taking five consecutive days of vacation, fully unplugged from work
• Up to six weeks of paid bereavement leave, medical leave, and disaster leave
• 12-week paid parental leave after 6 months at the company
• 5-week sabbatical on your 5 year anniversary
• Health insurance, dental and vision, commuter benefits, & 401(k) benefits with company matching
• Guaranteed minimum 1-month severance if things don't work out