Backend Engineer; SF​/On-site

Soulside AI is transforming how behavioral health organizations operate, unlocking massive efficiency gains through AI. Our platform cuts documentation time by 80%—turning 3+ hours of daily paperwork into 30 minutes—so these organizations can focus resources on patient care, growth, and innovation. The impact is immediate: better outcomes, reduced costs, and the ability to serve more patients without adding administrative overhead.

We're scaling fast and building the infrastructure that will power mental healthcare for decades. This is your chance to join as a founding engineer and shape a platform that every behavioral health organization will depend on. You'll build technology that directly improves millions of lives while capturing an enormous market opportunity. The timing is perfect, the problem is real, and the upside is massive.

Why this role matters:

Shape the technical foundation of a company revolutionizing mental health care

Work directly with founders on architecture decisions that will scale with our growth

Build distributed systems handling clinical healthcare data using Spring Boot & Kafka

Own major features end-to-end with full accountability for outcomes

Our momentum speaks for itself:

• Backed by Counterpart Ventures, Grey Matter Capital, Sarah Smith Fund & Kaya Ventures
• UCSF Rosenman Healthtech Innovator 2024
• One Mind Accelerator 2024 & PeakXV Spark Program
• Global Top 10 - Confluent Data Streaming Challenge

We're seeking a Backend Engineer to join our core team as we build technology that transforms behavioral health care. As one of our early engineering hires, you'll have outsized impact on our technical architecture, product direction, and company culture. You'll be responsible for designing and implementing scalable backend systems that process sensitive healthcare data, working with distributed architectures that support real-time patient interactions, and contributing to AI-driven clinical tools that directly impact patient outcomes.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a company that's revolutionizing mental health care, with significant equity upside and the autonomy to make architectural decisions that will scale with our growth.

Architect and develop core backend services using Spring Boot that power our AI-driven platform

Design and implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability infrastructure using Prometheus and Grafana

Configure and manage AWS scaling policies to ensure system reliability and cost optimization

Build distributed systems leveraging message queues and streaming platforms (SQS, Kafka, Kinesis) for high-volume asynchronous workloads

Implement robust data reliability strategies including redundancy, failure handling, and disaster recovery

Design and optimize LLM integration pipelines, including prompt engineering, usage monitoring, and quality assurance

Establish security best practices using Spring Security, implement RBAC, and ensure HIPAA compliance

Model and optimize complex clinical and operational workflows, translating domain requirements into well-structured, maintainable backend processes

Make foundational technical decisions that will scale as we grow from startup to industry leader

Collaborate directly with founders and clinical teams to translate healthcare needs into scalable technical solutions

Own major product features end-to-end, from architecture to deployment.

Systems Thinker:
You naturally reason about distributed systems, failure modes, and data consistency. You design for what goes wrong, not just what goes right.

Reliability-Focused:
You believe monitoring and alerting aren't afterthoughts—they're core engineering deliverables. You sleep better when dashboards are green and alerts are actionable.

Problem Solver:
You are resourceful and can architect smart solutions when faced with complex, non-standard requirements or scaling challenges.

Ownership Mindset:
You are happy to roll up your sleeves to handle both high-level architecture decisions and the critical operational details that keep a production system running.

2+ years of software engineering…