Senior Python Engineer (Backend)

Every year, U.S. health plans lose billions to improper payments and administrative waste. That wasted spending ultimately trickles down across the healthcare ecosystem, driving up costs for plans, providers, and patients alike. We’re here to change that paradigm.

Alaffia is a new kind of claims operations partner for health plans. Using expert clinicians and transparent AI, we deliver deeper insights, smarter automation, and consistently better outcomes across the entire lifecycle of claims. With Alaffia, health plans can cut wasted spending more effectively than ever — and provide their members the most affordable care.

We’re a high-growth, venture-backed Series B healthtech startup based in NYC and are actively scaling our company. Join us in helping to build a healthcare system that works better for everyone.

About the Role & What You’ll Be Doing

Alaffia Health is a healthcare AI startup revolutionizing medical billing and data automation. Our AI-driven platform leverages state-of-the-art generative AI and machine learning technologies to enhance accuracy, efficiency, and compliance in medical billing and auditing. As we scale, we are seeking a Senior Python Backend Engineer to build cutting-edge AI products, drive innovation, and shape the future of healthcare automation.

You will have the opportunity to work with the latest cutting edge AI technologies while implementing features that directly impact healthcare organizations. You will be tasked to build the GenAI framework for the engineering team to build the AI agent on and lead the effort to scale our GenAI applications. In this role, you'll be building the future of healthcare automation while tackling challenging problems in web development, system design, and cloud infrastructure.

Key Skills & Qualifications

Code Fluency

• Write code that captures the essential nature of the solution and is appropriately flexible, reusable, efficient, and adaptable to changing requirements.

• Provide high quality code review feedback and adopt approaches to foster effective and collaborative code review culture.

• Strong awareness of the technologies used by the team and the ecosystem around these technologies and able to introduce new ideas to solve business and technical problems.

• Responsible for successful delivery of their projects, including planning, risk management, design, development, testing, rollout, and maintenance.

• Identify ways to simplify application code/infrastructure and improve developer efficiency as measured by cycle time, ramp-up time, or other similar measurements.

• Experience with enterprise codebases and the ability to onboard into an established product.

• Preemptively identify and resolve technical risks before they jeopardize the project. Resolve cross-team dependencies earlier to ensure the successful execution of the project.

• Avoid re-inventing the wheel by leveraging other Alaffia Health solutions or off-the-shelf solutions with the possible trade-off in mind.

Software Design

• Responsible for designing the software or systems in the owned area and ensuring that they meet their design objectives.

• Give quality feedback on designs written by other members of the team, asking probing, insightful questions that solidify choices and surface erroneous assumptions.

• Effectively and quickly debug cross-module issues, and may intuit where bugs might lie due to deep knowledge of the libraries, platforms, and systems that the software relies on.

Architecture Design

• Create coherent designs with multiple components interacting across API or system boundaries; bugs do not creep in at the boundaries between components due to mismatches in expectations of what is technically feasible.

• Capable of rolling out a component or major feature (and deprecating an existing system or feature) reliably - including appropriate monitoring, paging, etc are in place, and that failure domains are understood and characterized appropriately, avoid introducing toil and future maintenance work by proactively avoiding scaling issues and providing adequate documentation before large scale rollout. For early stage products, roll out with an eye toward achieving learning goals untainted by poor quality and know when to make appropriate tradeoffs for “failing fast”.

• Design clear success metrics and achieve those metrics consistently post-launch through the lifetime of the system or feature. For early stage products, those success metrics may be oriented around learning goals rather than usage goals, given the inherent unpredictability of achieving product/market fit.

Business Acumen

• Engage in listening sessions to increase learning to guide work/priorities

• Have a working knowledge of Alaffia Health’s strategy and organization structure to work effectively across the org and able to help other engineers to effectively collaborate effectively

Requirements for the Role:

• Collaborating cross functionally with other engineer disciplines, including fullstack, data, devops and AI engineers, as well as product, and business team to craft a feature-rich GenAI powered agentic workflow framework to speed up Alaffia Health’s AI agent development workflow

• Designing, developing, and deploying data intensive applications with python in a production environment.

Required:

• 7+ years industry experience with large-scale and production-level API development and backend data processing

• Developing test suites and working with CI/CD tooling for automation

• Hands-on experience with relational databases and data model design.

• Utilizing and improving observability practices that include logging and user activity metrics to integrate with Datadog and other observability tooling

Preferred:

• Building SasS app in the healthcare sector

• Building and deploying user facing AI products

• Building python SDK / libraries |

• Experience with DevOps and cloud provider, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP

• Experience with vector databases

• Experience with data processing orchestrators, such as Airflow or Dagster

• Experience with message queue system, such as AWS SQS, Kinesis or Kafka

Our Culture

Alaffia was born out of our founders’ personal connection to the inefficiency of the U.S. healthcare system. We are deeply mission-driven, with an abiding belief that technology can help create a better future for everyone — and we’re looking for others who share our passion for change to join the team.

What Else Do You Get Working With Us?

• Competitive Compensation (Salary + Equity)

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits

• Flexible, paid vacation policy

• Work in a flat organizational structure — direct access to Leadership