Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Department: Engineering

Location: Remote

Compensation: $175K – $200K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Who we are:

Apella is applying computer vision and machine learning to improve the standard of care in the most critical aspect of healthcare: surgery. We build applications to enable surgeons, nurses, and hospital administrators to deliver the highest quality care.

Who you are:

You are a skilled backend software engineer with a strong foundation in service design and distributed systems. You enjoy architecting reliable, scalable services and infrastructure that power complex applications, and you're comfortable working across service boundaries, platform tooling, and the infrastructure that supports them.

In this role you'll:

• Design and implement backend services and infrastructure that power our platform's core functionality.

• Build and maintain reliable APIs, service interfaces, and platform tooling to support application needs.

• Collaborate with product and engineering partners to understand system requirements and translate them into robust technical solutions.

• Build systems for media capture, storage, and serving that support high-quality video and imaging workflows.

• Implement observability, error handling, and monitoring to ensure system reliability in production.

• Contribute to the design and evolution of secure, scalable infrastructure that supports high-throughput backend workloads.

• Develop shared GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines with progressive delivery patterns (canary rollouts, automated testing).

What you'll bring:

• 4+ years of experience in backend software engineering, with a focus on service-oriented architectures, high-throughput systems, and platform infrastructure.

• Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming language (Python, Java, Go, etc.).

• Experience designing and consuming APIs (REST, GraphQL, gRPC, etc.) and working with asynchronous or message-based systems.

• Hands-on experience with SQL and/or NoSQL databases.

• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar) and how applications run in production environments.

• Experience building resilient systems with proper testing, validation, and error handling.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code or platform tooling that supports backend services.

Nice to Have:

• Experience working in regulated or high-compliance environments.

• Familiarity with streaming or event-driven platforms (Kafka, Pub/Sub, etc.).

• Experience with containerized workloads and modern delivery and deployment patterns.

• Background in data modeling, schema evolution, or data quality management.

• Experience with media capture, storage, and delivery systems.

• Familiarity with GitOps tools (ArgoCD, Flux) or progressive delivery patterns (canary deployments, feature flags).

What to expect from our interview process:

• Chat with Our Recruiter – A quick intro to get to know you and share more about Apella & the role

• Complete a Coding Exercise – Work through a collaborative coding exercise with one of our engineers

• Virtual Onsite Interviews – Meet a few team members and dive into areas like collaboration, culture, and role-specific skills. Typically 3-4 interviews

• Meet with one or two of our founders – Usually "reverse interview" style where you can ask questions and make sure we're the right fit for you

Our benefits:

• Competitive salary and stock options

• Flexible vacation policy and a culture that values time for rest and recharging

• Remote-first work environment with unique virtual and in-person events to foster team connection

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance—we're a healthcare company that prioritizes your health

• 16 weeks of parental leave for all parents

Apella is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply to our roles.