Principal Software Engineer - Backend

About Us

Hippocratic AI is the leading generative AI company in healthcare. We have the only system that can have safe, autonomous, clinical conversations with patients. We have trained our own LLMs as part of our Polaris constellation, resulting in a system with over 99.9% accuracy.

Why Join Our Team

• Reinvent healthcare with AI that puts safety first. We’re building the world’s first healthcare-only, safety-focused LLM — a breakthrough platform designed to transform patient outcomes at a global scale. This is category creation.

• Work with the people shaping the future. Hippocratic AI was co-founded by CEO Munjal Shah and a team of physicians, hospital leaders, AI pioneers, and researchers from institutions like El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

• Backed by the world’s leading healthcare and AI investors. We recently raised a $126M Series C at a $3.5B valuation, led by Avenir Growth, bringing total funding to $404M with participation from CapitalG, General Catalyst, a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Premji Invest, UHS, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, John Doerr, Rick Klausner, and others.

• Build alongside the best in healthcare and AI. Join experts who’ve spent their careers improving care, advancing science, and building world-changing technologies — ensuring our platform is powerful, trusted, and truly transformative.

We believe the best ideas happen together. To support fast collaboration and a strong team culture, this role is expected to be in our Palo Alto office five days a week unless otherwise specified.

About the Role

As a Principal Backend Engineer at Hippocratic AI, you will be a technical leader responsible for architecting and scaling the backend systems that power our Generative AI healthcare products. You will influence core technical strategy, guide system design, and ensure the reliability and safety of backend services used by clinicians, patients, and enterprise healthcare partners.

You will partner with leaders across product, clinical, AI research, and design teams to define long-term backend direction, shape engineering standards, and build the scalable data and service infrastructure that enables LLM-powered voice agents to operate safely in healthcare environments. This role requires deep expertise, strong architectural instincts, and a passion for building mission-critical systems that support real-world healthcare workflows.

What You'll Do

• Architect and build scalable backend systems to support high-performance AI and real-time healthcare applications.

• Lead the design of large-scale data pipelines and backend workflows supporting ML and data teams.

• Own and evolve core APIs, microservices, and orchestration layers that interface with LLMs and agentic AI systems.

• Establish and enforce world-class security, privacy, and compliance standards for healthcare data.

• Drive major reliability, observability, and performance improvements across the backend stack.

• Partner with product and clinical leaders to translate complex workflows into robust backend architectures.

• Mentor engineers across levels and elevate engineering standards.

• Contribute to long-range platform and infrastructure strategy for AI-driven healthcare systems.

What You Bring

Must Have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including architecting production systems.

• Deep expertise in Python, Go, or similar backend languages.

• Familiarity with SaaS control planes, relational databases, and RESTful APIs.

• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, S3).

• Proven ability to architect scalable systems and deliver high-quality, production-grade code.

• Exceptional communication and the ability to drive technical direction across teams.

Nice to Have:

• Experience Building agentic frameworks or orchestration platforms for LLM-based agents

• Designing/deploying conversational AI backends

• Developing production-grade LLM applications or autonomous agents

If you’re an engineer passionate about building high scale AI-powered experiences and ready to work on cutting-edge B2B products that make a real impact in healthcare, we’d love to hear from you.

Join our team at Hippocratic AI and help shape the future of clinically safe, production-grade AI systems.

***Be aware of recruitment scams impersonating Hippocratic AI. All recruiting communication will come from @hippocraticai.com email addresses. We will never request payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process. If anything