Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer - Activation

Virta Health is on a mission to transform type 2 diabetes and weight-loss care. Current treatment approaches aren’t working—over half of US adults have either type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, and obesity rates are at an all-time high. Virta is changing this by helping people reverse their metabolic condition through innovations in technology, personalized nutrition, and virtual care delivery reinvented from the ground up. We have raised over $350 million from top-tier investors, and partner with the largest health plans, employers, and government organizations to help their employees and members restore their health and take back their lives. Join us on our mission to reverse diabetes in 100 million people.

About the Role

As a member of the Activation team, you will play a crucial role in supporting Virta’s growth and scalability. You will design systems and applications that guide our expanding eligible population from initial application through their first transformative experiences on our life–changing treatment. This includes evolving a performant backend architecture for our web and mobile interfaces, and designing a platform for a best-in-class user experience with experimentation, rapid iteration, and powerful data as core principles.

In this role, you will be establishing strategic and architectural direction for our team and across the organization. You will build features and maintain our cross-platform applications that are used daily by our applicants, early-tenured members, and internal operations teams. The ideal candidate will be an expert in software architecture design and have experience in helping teams grow and evolve with the changing needs of the organization.

Responsibilities

1. Partner with product management, applied AI, data analytics, QA and non-technical stakeholders to develop high-impact features and a long-term technical roadmap that drives us toward our goal of bringing the Virta treatment to 100+ million people.
2. Be a technical leader while developing and driving large scale initiatives as well as mentoring and growing team members in their initiatives.
3. Modernize and improve backend systems performance that support our product at increasing scale.
4. Collaboratively code and ship features and feature improvements for our mobile apps and related services at high velocity and high quality with adequate test coverage in 2-week sprints.
5. Rotate on-call to support products and services the team manages and troubleshoot, debug, and fix issues across the platform.

90 Day Plan

1. Release features with measurable impact and complete test coverage to production.
2. Observe current development practices and propose, execute and evangelize one or more improvements to make our developer experience even better.
3. Develop and evaluate feature release success criteria metrics and iterate for impact.
4. Collaborate with other engineering team members through knowledge sharing, pair programming, and giving feedback in code reviews.

Must-Haves

1. 5+ years programming in high-quality backend development for a production environment.
2. Passion for learning and adapting to new technologies to solve problems.
3. Expertise in distributed systems, data stores, data modeling, and performance optimization.
4. Expertise working with multiple request architecture patterns such as REST, gRPC, and/or GraphQL.
5. Expertise with data and event-based architectures (SQL/NoSQL datastores, messaging queues, etc.).
6. Proficiency in communicating with business and technical stakeholders.
7. Eye for design, and empathy for users. Be able to critique and think through how designs will impact our end users, not just the code.
8. Comfortable working with legacy code and willing to work towards improving it.
9. Has an "I am a Problem Solver" and "Pitch in where needed" mindset.
10. Understanding and experience with Go and/or Python.

Nice-to-Haves

1. Knowledge of authentication patterns and best practices.
2. Experience with frontend development, TypeScript and modern JavaScript libraries.
3. Knowledgeable of a variety of data access patterns.
4. Experience with one or more experimentation platforms.
5. Familiarity with domain-driven design and decomposing monoliths.

Values-driven culture

Virta’s company values drive our culture, so you’ll do well if:

1. You put people first and take care of yourself, your peers, and our patients equally.
2. You have a strong sense of ownership and take initiative while empowering others to do the same.
3. You prioritize positive impact over busy work.
4. You have no ego and understand that everyone has something to bring to the table regardless of experience.
5. You appreciate transparency and promote trust and empowerment through open access of information.
6. You are evidence-based and prioritize data and science over seniority or dogma.
7. You take risks and rapidly iterate.