Senior Backend Engineer, Benefits Platform

About River Health

River Health is a healthcare benefits company. Employers offer River plans to their teams, members enroll and get care through our apps, and our clinical team coordinates visits, labs and follow-up. One Go backend runs all of it: member, employer, broker, provider and admin apps, plus the partners that issue cards, take payments, run vision benefits and receive our eligibility files.

We're hiring a senior backend engineer to own the riskiest parts of that backend. You'll be the person who says yes or no on changes that touch billing, eligibility, member health data and scheduled jobs. Most of our code is written with AI agents, and your judgment is what makes it safe to ship.

What you'll own

• The core API. A Go service on Postgres. You co-own it with the engineering lead and are the reviewer of record for billing, eligibility, partner integration and member data changes.
• Plans, enrollment and billing. Plan configuration, employer contributions, plan years, Stripe subscriptions, and the path from an employer's eligibility file to an active member. Getting dates and dollars right.
• Partner integrations. Eligibility exports over SFTP, a card program for in-person visits, lifecycle email and SMS, vision benefits, e-prescribing, video visits and HR data. When a partner's records and ours disagree, you find out why.
• Scheduled jobs. Workers that pause, top up, reconcile and sync. You make them idempotent, observable and safe to rerun.
• Production health. Structured logs, traces and alerts. You work the production errors queue down and keep it down. You're part of the on-call rotation: [rotation length, how often, and whether pages come outside business hours].
• Member data protection. Access scoping, audit logging and HIPAA data handling across every endpoint.
• Agent guardrails for billing, eligibility and member data. The skills, guidance, evals and guardrails that let agents, and the people using them, work safely in these areas. You and the engineering lead decide what an agent does on its own and where a person signs off.

How we build

• Small pods. Cross-functional pods own outcomes. You sit in the Clinical Pod, which owns the patient and provider experience, and review backend work for every pod.
• AI-first, end to end. Agents plan, build, review and test. Engineers spend their time on judgment: scoping, review, data correctness and production calls.
• You own QA for what you ship. End to end ownership of projects is typical - plan, build, test and rollout. An automation partner covers regression.
• Product ships code too. Product makes light-weight code changes and design in front-end code.

What you bring

• Health and Benefits industry and/or System of Record experience. US health benefits experience: enrollment, eligibility files, benefits administration, TPA, payer, ICHRA or digital health company. Or the same kind of work in payroll, insurance or fintech, where records have effective dates, eligibility rules and partner files.
• Experience working with coding agents and check what they claim. You hand them whole tickets, run several at once, and can show us your setup. Before you approve, you ask what the agent searched and which test fails without the change.
• 6+ years building backend systems in production. Go in production, or deep experience in another typed language and ready to work in Go from week one.
• Strong Postgres. Data modeling, migrations on live data, and reviewing queries for scope and cost.
• Shipped code that moves money. Stripe or similar: subscriptions, proration, failed payments, webhooks.
• Partner integrations with messy data. File feeds, SFTP, webhooks, retries and reconciliation.
• You make the engineers around you better. You step in to unblock teammates, pair when it helps, and guide or mentor as needed, without waiting to be asked.
• Clear writing for non-engineers. A clinical ops lead should understand your release note.

Nice to have

• LLMs in a regulated setting: PHI handling, evals
• HIPAA programs, BAAs and audit logging
• OpenTelemetry, Axiom or similar observability tools
• TypeScript and React
• Card issuing or other fintech programs
• 834 EDI or carrier eligibility feeds

This role isn't for you if

• You want a separate QA team to catch your bugs.
• You want finished specs before you start. Here you help write them.
• You don't use AI coding tools, or you trust them without checking.
• You'd rather not talk with ops and clinical teams.

Compensation and how to apply

• Compensation: $175,000 to $210,000 base, plus equity
• Benefits:
• • Medical, dental, and vision benefits, with up to $600/month in employer-funded reimbursement through our ICHRA, plus River Essentials and XP Vision coverage for all employees.
  • Paid time off and company holidays
  • Training and professional development
  • Transportation stipend
  • 401k w/ company match

In addition to sharing your resume and please respond (under 350 words) to the below via cover letter:

Answer the first question, then pick one of the other four.

Everyone answers: Tell us about an agent-written backend PR you sent back even though its tests passed. What was wrong, how did you catch it, and did you change anything so the agent wouldn't make the same mistake again?

Then pick one:

1. A time production data was wrong: dates, dollar amounts, a record your system and a partner's system disagreed on (such as a customer your system showed as cancelled who was still active with the partner), or a bulk edit or migration that didn't do what you expected. How did you find it, and how did you fix the records that were already affected?
2. A job, import or webhook that ran twice or stopped halfway. What did it do to the data, and what did you change so it was safe to run again?
3. A backlog of production errors or noisy alerts that you worked down. What did you fix first, and why?
4. A backend change you had to explain to people outside engineering, such as an operations or support team. What did they need to know, and how did you make sure it landed?