Staff Back-End Engineer: Search APIs
AI summary of the role
Staff Backend Engineer to lead the architecture of public gRPC APIs and SDKs for provider search, ranking, and dynamic copay lookups at a Series A health insurance startup.
What you’ll do
- Drive technical direction and implementation for client-facing gRPC APIs and SDKs powering provider search, ranking, and dynamic copay lookups.
- Own public API design decisions: versioning, backward compatibility, field masks, CEL-based filtering, error semantics, and gRPC status code conventions.
- Design and evolve ranking and steerage logic balancing relevance, network status, cost, client overrides, and plan-specific incentives.
- Design for scale and reliability: geofenced queries, rate limiting, retry/timeout budgets, and graceful degradation.
What you’ll bring
- 8+ years building backend services and distributed systems.
- Deep experience with search systems and architecture at scale, including tradeoffs between recall, precision, and latency.
- Experience across multiple search paradigms: keyword/lexical, vector/embedding, and LLM-driven retrieval/reranking.
- Track record shipping public APIs and SDKs with versioning and backward compatibility.
Technologies
gRPC · protobuf · Go · Python · TypeScript · GCP · AlloyDB · Postgres · BigQuery · Bigtable · Terraform · CEL
Source and classification
Production engineering · Evidence for this classification:
About Helm Health Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that lets members see simple, upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care. Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join! Role Overview & Team Context Helm's Search and Dynamic Copay APIs are the critical interfaces our customers build on: a member describes a symptom or searches for a
More from the job description
About Helm Health Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that lets members see simple, upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care. Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join! Role Overview & Team Context Helm's Search and Dynamic Copay APIs are the critical interfaces our customers build on: a member describes a symptom or searches for a specialist, and our search and ranking engine surfaces the right providers and their copays for that service. These are public, versioned gRPC APIs shipped with client SDKs in Go, Python, and TypeScript, and they sit directly in the critical path of every plan sponsor and partner application built on Helm. We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to serve as the technical lead for our public API surface area. You'll own the architecture of provider search, ranking, and copay lookup, and you'll help [... source excerpt omitted ...] and designs, while also setting technical direction, driving execution, mentoring engineers, and scaling the team. 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 rele [... source excerpt omitted ...] 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 ea
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