- 7+ years of backend development experience, including at least 3 years focused on data platforms and backend infrastructure for data-centric applications: transactional systems, event pipelines, and the APIs that serve them
- Highly proficient in at least one technical area relevant to this work: data modeling, distributed systems, API design, or database engineering, with the depth that others on a team come to you for
- Strong proficiency in SQL, with production experience working with PostgreSQL as an application database; you write and tune queries fluently and are comfortable reasoning about schema design, indexes, and query plans
- Hands-on experience with data streaming and event processing, using Kafka (our event bus) or an equivalent such as RabbitMQ, Pulsar, or a cloud-based equivalent like Amazon Kinesis
- Proficiency in Julia or Python; Julia is a core Datastore language, and experience with Julia is a strong plus, but not required — we welcome candidates eager to learn it!
- Experience deploying and operating services in containerized environments, with familiarity in Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and/or Helm
- A track record of mentoring engineers and improving how a team works - practices, tooling, test coverage, or documentation that outlasted your involvement
- A collaborative mindset: you enjoy working across disciplines and believe people achieve more together than alone
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in asynchronous and remote-friendly environments
- A self-directed approach, with a track record of thriving in hybrid or fully remote teams
- Experience with, or interest in, using LLM-assisted or agentic coding tools in a production setting, with good judgment about what guardrails are needed
For the Datastore Systems role
- You can lead design across the breadth of the platform.
- GraphQL and TypeScript/JavaScript (Node.js) - GraphQL is the Datastore's primary interface, and this profile owns significant parts of it
- Designing event-driven pipelines end to end: producers, consumers, replay, idempotency, and what happens when a consumer falls behind
- Leading the design of complex systems rather than individual components, across the API, the pipelines, and the services that depend on them
For the PostgreSQL & Data Modeling role
- You can be the person the rest of the team comes to about the database.
- Deep PostgreSQL: you reason fluently about the query planner, index selection, and EXPLAIN (ANALYZE), and why a query that should be fast isn't
- Data modeling: you design the schema itself: entities, relationships, and the constraints that make invalid states impossible. Including how to model time, since clinical results get re-scored and corrected and we need to answer "what did this look like when the report was signed?"
- Schema evolution under load: zero-downtime migrations, dual-write transitions, lock avoidance, backfill and verification. Our schema has hundreds of migrations behind it and will have hundreds more
- Operating PostgreSQL in production, not only designing for it: upgrades, replication, backup and restore, connection pooling, bloat and vacuum behaviour, extensions
- Making others good at it: you teach, review, and document, because a schema only stays coherent if the team understands it
We don't expect every candidate to check every box. If you bring strong fundamentals, care about data infrastructure for health, and are excited to learn, we’d love to hear from you!
The US-based salary range for this role is $170,000 – $190,000. Salary ranges are determined using current market compensation data for this role and adjusted based on experience, skills, and location. The base salary is one component of the total compensation package, which includes equity, PTO and other benefits.
At Beacon, we've found that cultural and scientific impact is driven most by those that lead by example. As such, we're always seeking new contributors whose work demonstrates an avid curiosity, a bias towards simplicity, an eye for composability, a self-service mindset, and - most of all - a deep empathy towards colleagues, stakeholders, users, and patients. We believe a diverse team builds more robust systems and achieves higher impact.