Tech Lead - Platform Engineer

We’re looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to drive the technical direction of Carbon Health’s core platform and foundational services: the backend systems, service-to-service communication, and infrastructure that every product team builds on.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role. You’ll set architectural direction, make pragmatic decisions about reliability and scale, and still write and review code alongside the team.

You’ll work in a JVM‑based microservices environment on AWS, in a healthcare setting where availability, data integrity, and security directly affect patient care.

• Lead technical work on building and scaling Carbon Health’s core platform and foundational services.
• Drive architectural decisions for highly available, scalable backend systems, and document them so the whole team understands the trade‑offs.
• Shape how services talk to each other: gRPC contracts and their evolution, deadlines and timeout, retries with backoff, idempotency, and graceful degradation when a dependency fails.
• Design event‑driven and asynchronous workflows that stay consistent under failure, using patterns such as idempotent consumers, dead‑letter handling, Saga, and Transactional Outbox.
• Own the platform’s infrastructure as code: set Terraform standards and module structure, review infrastructure changes like application code, and keep environments reproducible.
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines so teams can ship small changes to production quickly and safely.
• Define service‑level objectives with the team and make services observable through metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, and actionable alerting.
• Lead incident response and blameless post‑mortems, and turn their findings into lasting reliability improvements.
• Guide data design across relational databases, caches, and search stores, keeping performance predictable as data grows.
• Make security and compliance part of the platform: access control, encryption, secrets management, and audit trails for sensitive healthcare data.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing, and provide technical leadership across backend and frontend domains.
• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and fast, reliable delivery.

• 5+ years of experience designing, building, and operating backend or distributed systems in production.
• 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership role.
• Strong experience with microservice architectures on AWS.
• Proficiency in at least one strongly typed JVM language, preferably Kotlin, Scala, or Java.
• Hands‑on experience with gRPC or a similar RPC framework, including contract design, timeouts, retries, and failure handling between services.
• Experience with event‑driven architecture and message queues, and with the delivery and consistency challenges that come with them.
• Solid experience with relational databases (schema design, indexing, query performance), plus caching and search data stores.
• Hands‑on experience managing infrastructure with Terraform.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience running services in production: observability, incident response, and root‑cause analysis.
• Ability to work as an independent technical leader, designing and delivering new capabilities with a distributed team.
  
  Professional working proficiency in English, both written and verbal.

• Experience in healthcare technology or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience with healthcare data standards such as HL7 or FHIR.
• Experience with resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, and rate limiting.
• Experience with stream processing or change data capture.
• Experience with containers and container orchestration.
• Experience reducing…