Staff Backend Solution Architect

About the role

You will own the technical strategy and execution of the backend platforms that enable Heidi's clinical AI agents to deliver real-time assistance to millions of clinicians worldwide. This role requires you to translate ambiguous product and AI requirements into resilient, scalable, and secure system designs that clinicians can depend on in critical care moments. You will act as the primary technical partner for product and AI teams, challenging assumptions and shaping the architecture of new capabilities from inception through to production. You will define service boundaries, data contracts, and operational standards that allow multiple teams to ship features independently and safely. You will balance trade-offs between performance, cost, and complexity to ensure that the infrastructure remains robust as we scale globally. You will mentor engineers on best practices for reliability, testing, and observability so that the entire backend culture matures alongside you. You will be responsible for ensuring that every decision we make passes the trust test, because healthcare systems cannot afford surprises when lives are on the line.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and build backend services that power LLM-based agents and clinical automations across high-availability environments.
• Design robust APIs and data models that are secure, observable, and straightforward for other teams to extend without constant intervention.
• Optimise performance and cost by profiling hot paths, tuning databases, and right-sizing cloud resources to meet clinical demand patterns.
• Automate quality by writing comprehensive unit and integration tests, crafting meaningful alerts, and owning on-call runbooks so that incidents are resolved quickly and reliably.
• Partner with product, AI, and frontend engineers to ship new capabilities from concept to production in weeks, not quarters, while maintaining strict compliance and safety standards.
• Evaluate and integrate AI and LLM services, streaming protocols, and real-time audio pipelines to ensure that clinical workflows remain responsive and accurate.
• Define and enforce architectural guardrails, including data governance, security policies, and operational runbooks that scale with the business.
• Analyse complex system behaviour using observability data to drive improvements in reliability, latency, and user experience for clinicians in every timezone.
• Lead infrastructure decisions on containerisation, orchestration, and deployment pipelines to ensure that services are reproducible, secure, and easy to operate.
• Mentor backend engineers by elevating code review standards, documentation quality, and testing discipline across the entire platform team.

Requirements

• Mastery of software-engineering fundamentals; Python is our primary language, but you move fluently between technologies when the problem demands.
• Proven experience designing APIs using REST or GraphQL, and building event-driven systems with technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, or similar messaging platforms.
• Deep coding and architect mindset with hands-on experience in test-driven development, AI-assisted coding, microservices, and eventual consistency patterns.
• Deep database expertise covering schema design, query optimisation, and scaling strategies for both relational and NoSQL databases, with MongoDB experience being a significant advantage.
• Cloud fluency across major providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, including containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, security controls, and observability practices.
• A track record of shipping and operating distributed systems at scale with high reliability, including experience managing uptime, failure modes, and recovery procedures.
• Rigorous testing, code-review, and documentation habits that raise the standard for quality and clarity across engineering teams.
• Hands-on work with AI or LLM services, or real-time audio and streaming pipelines, demonstrating an understanding of the constraints and nuances of these technologies.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical direction without relying on formal authority, collaborating effectively with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, mission-critical environment where decisions must balance innovation with the safety and wellbeing of patients.

Nice to have

Only if the source material specifies preferred qualifications, which in this case it does not; therefore no additional items are listed.

Practical notes

The role is full-time based in Sydney. We operate on outcomes over inputs, trusting our team to manage their schedules while delivering against ambitious goals. Travel is not required as the position is fully remote-compatible, though collaboration with global teams may involve occasional overlap across time zones. Candidates must be eligible to work in Australia and meet the standard requirements for employment in the region. There are no specific visa sponsorship details published at this time, and the posting remains open until the role is filled.