Senior Back-End Engineer: Infrastructure

About Helm Health

Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that lets members see simple, upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care.

Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join!

Role Overview

We're seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Infrastructure team and report to our Principal DevOps Engineer. You'll focus on platform engineering and DevOps — CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, reliability, and operational tooling. You'll serve as the second engineer on the Infrastructure team, providing cross-coverage, including shared on-call rotation. We're looking for someone with strong backend engineering fundamentals and infrastructure expertise — you should be comfortable reading and reasoning about application code and understanding it in the context of deployed production services.

Responsibilies

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, and infrastructure automation.
• Manage and scale cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform
• Maintain and extend infrastructure-as-code with Terraform/Terraform Cloud
• Support database operations across PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery, Bigtable, and Firestore — including provisioning, scaling, backups, and performance tuning
• Contribute to monitoring, alerting, and observability across production systems
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response
• Support compliance and security requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2)

Requirements

• 5+ years in backend engineering, with significant infrastructure or DevOps experience
• Strong Terraform/Terraform Cloud experience
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production
• Google Cloud Platform experience
• Hands-on experience operating and scaling databases (relational and NoSQL)
• Experience with CI/CD systems, monitoring, and observability tooling
• Backend engineering fundamentals — you've built and maintained production services, even if infrastructure is now your primary focus

Preferred Qualifications

• Go proficiency
• Experience with disaster recovery planning and runbook creation
• Healthcare infrastructure experience — HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST
• Incident management tooling (incident.io or similar)
• Python proficiency
• Start-up experience

Characteristics

• Reliable and detail-oriented — infrastructure mistakes are expensive, and you take that seriously.
• Mission-driven — motivated by making healthcare simpler and more transparent
• Willing to ask questions and admit what you don't know
• Versatile — you're an infrastructure specialist who can context-switch into application-level work when needed

Internal Tools/Technology

• HCP Terraform / Google Cloud Platform
• Cursor / Linear / GitHub / Notion / Whimsical
• Slack / Google Workspace / Zoom
• incident.io / Sentry / Cloudsmith
• Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — we are an AI-forward engineering team
• macOS / Linux

Compensation

The target base salary range for this position is $150,000 - $225,000 and is part of a competitive total rewards package including equity and benefits. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors, including experience, skills, location, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations.

Benefits/Offerings

• Unlimited PTO (mandatory 12 days)
• Computer + home office stipend
• 401(k) + matching
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Autonomy and tons of room for career growth

Occasional Travel

We meet quarterly as a company.

Please note that this is a fully remote opportunity.