Staff Back-End Engineer: Search APIs

Location: USA

Department: Engineering

Location Type: REMOTE

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

About Helm Health

Role Overview & Team Context

Responsibilies

• 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 that external developers can build reliable integrations against.
• 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.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years building backend services and distributed systems.
• Deep experience with search systems and architecture at scale - you've built or evolved a production search or ranking system, and understand the tradeoffs between recall, precision, and latency at high query volume.
• Experience across multiple search architectures & paradigms — keyword/lexical search, vector/embedding-based retrieval, and LLM-driven query understanding or reranking — and a point of view on when to reach for each.
• A track record shipping public APIs and SDKs: versioning, backward compatibility, and multi-language client libraries external developers can rely on.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical lead: setting architectural direction, writing clear design docs, and raising the bar for engineers around you, while influencing without authority.
• Experience running GCP data infrastructure at scale — AlloyDB/Postgres, BigQuery, Bigtable — and good instincts for matching store to access pattern.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 (geofencing, distance-based ranking) at scale.
• Experience building retrieval evaluation frameworks — knowing how actually to measure whether search results are "good."
• Experience in Go, with real gRPC and protobuf experience in production.
• Terraform/Terraform Cloud
• Start-up experience

Characteristics

• Ownership that shows up before you're asked — you protect the systems you own and see problems through.
• Mission-driven — motivated by making healthcare simpler and more transparent
• Curiosity that digs past the first plausible explanation, and the self-motivation to raise the next hard problem before it's urgent.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving team where requirements evolve quickly

Internal Tools/Technology

• Cursor / Linear / GitHub / Notion / Whimsical
• Slack / Google Workspace / Zoom
• Incident.io / Sentry
• Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — we are an AI-forward engineering team
• macOS / Linux

Compensation

Benefits/Offerings

• 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

Occasional Travel