Senior/Staff Software Engineer
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- San Mateo, CA, US
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- A strong track record shipping production systems end-to-end
- Deep experience in at least one of backend/systems design, infrastructure, AI, or frontend, and the ability to go across all of them: Backend / systems design: you design services and data models othe
- Excellent judgment on trade-offs: you move fast without cutting the corners that matter
- Strong communication and the ability to work with non-engineering stakeholders (commercial, clinical, product)
- A commitment to clean architecture, readable code, and thorough testing, and a multiplier mindset that lifts the team
Full description
About Lighten
Lighten envisions a future where clinical data can drive the next generation of human health breakthroughs — from uncovering personalized treatment insights, to accelerating drug discoveries and driving adoption of innovative therapies. Lighten builds AI-native software platforms to transform raw clinical data into the highest quality patient journeys to accelerate evidence generation for R&D and bring life-saving therapies to the market faster. We partner with and empower life sciences and healthcare organizations to deliver on their mission for the benefit of the patients they serve.
We offer competitive salary and employee equity options, 3% company-sponsored 401k contributions, and comprehensive medical, dental and vision insurance for employees and their families.
The Role
We're looking for a Senior/Staff Software Engineer to help us build and scale the core platform that powers our data products. You'll work across the stack — from data infrastructure and backend services in AWS to the user-facing applications our customers rely on — and you'll play a key role in how we bring agentic AI capabilities into the product.
This is a high-ownership role for someone who's comfortable moving between infrastructure, backend, and frontend work, and who wants to help shape both the technical architecture and the engineering culture of a growing team.
What You'll Do
- Design, build, and ship full stack features across our platform — from data pipelines and APIs to the frontend experiences
- Own and evolve our AWS infrastructure: provisioning, scaling, security, cost efficiency, and reliability for systems handling healthcare data
- Architect and implement agentic AI workflows that improve how users interact with real-world data
- Partner closely with product, data science, and commercial teams to translate healthcare domain requirements into robust technical solutions
- Establish and improve engineering practices — code review, testing, CI/CD, observability — as the team scales
- Make thoughtful architectural decisions with an eye toward data privacy, PHI handling, and compliance requirements inherent to healthcare data
- Mentor other engineers and help set technical direction as a senior technical voice on the team
What We're Looking For
- A strong track record shipping production systems end-to-end
-
Deep experience in at least one of backend/systems design, infrastructure, AI, or frontend, and the ability to go across all of them:
- Backend / systems design: you design services and data models others build on, and you sweat the things that break under load, concurrency, consistency, failure modes (Python, Node.js, Go, or similar). Think: re-architecting a data pipeline to process 10x the volume, designing an API that a dozen teams depend on, or tracking down the race condition nobody else could.