Senior Backend Engineer, Application Platform

Hybrid in Palo Alto (Mon / Wed / Thurs) · $185k–$215K base + meaningful early-stage equity + full benefits

Specialty pharmacy is where the most complex and expensive drugs reach the most in-need patients, and it still runs on faxes, phone tag, and manual data entry. Patients wait weeks for therapies that can't wait.

Sodalis is building AI agents that run those operations end to end: reading and validating prescriptions, handling phone calls, and moving prescriptions through eligibility and fulfillment. The ambition goes beyond that. We want to be the rails every specialty prescription runs on, and the first system to perform clinical review at the standard of a pharmacist.

We're already in production, processing tens of thousands of prescriptions a week. Backed by Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), and founded by veterans of Apple's Applied ML, Included Health, and Avella Specialty Pharmacy (scaled to $1.5B+ before its acquisition by OptumRx).

Every pharmacy works from the same building blocks: prescriptions, directions, insurance claims, rejects. But each one handles them a little differently, so today every implementation means custom code. We want implementation to be configuration, done by a technical solutions team using internal tools, with no engineer in the loop. That's the engine you'd build.

It's a classic backend problem with real stakes. You'll model the shared primitives so one system can absorb each pharmacy's nuances, build the configuration layer and the backend behind the tools, and define the contract between the engine and the people tuning it. That includes how new versions roll out only to the customers who want them, on a system that's already live and can't break.

You'd own the application platform: the domain model, configuration layer, and tooling. You'd work directly with the founders and the early engineering team on the architecture and where the platform goes.

• Model the shared primitives (prescriptions, directions, insurance outcomes) and build the backend that turns each pharmacy's differences into configuration, so one system serves many pharmacies.

• Decide where the line between configuration and code sits: what a solutions team can safely configure, and what stays in the engine.

• Build the backend services and APIs behind the internal tools a solutions team uses to implement a new customer without an engineer.

• Define and version the contract between our engines and whoever configures them, so upgrades ship safely and selectively.

• Ship changes to a system that's live, where every prescription is a patient and a bad migration isn't an outage, it's a delayed therapy. Zero-downtime rollouts and safe versioning are table stakes here.

• Partner with the founders and early engineering team on architecture and roadmap.

• 5+ years building backend systems in production.

• Strong system design: you can take an open prompt, design a coherent system, and explain the trade-offs clearly.

• Solid data modeling and API design: you build systems that generalize, not one-offs.

• You've built something config-driven that other people operated: a rules engine, a multi-tenant platform, a feature-flag or rollout system, a workflow DSL. You know where those designs go wrong.

• You've shipped 0→1 in startups and are comfortable with ambiguity.

• You'll spend time with the solutions team and with pharmacies to understand how their workflows actually differ. No healthcare background required.

We're a handful of people going all in on a problem we think is worth it, holding a high bar and shipping work that reaches real patients. It's intense, and it isn't for everyone. We want people who want to build something that matters, alongside others who care as much as they do. If that's you, we should talk.