Staff Back-End Engineer: Search APIs

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 & Team Context

Helm's Search and Dynamic Copay APIs are the critical interfaces our customers build on: a member describes a symptom or searches for a specialist, and our search and ranking engine surfaces the right providers and their copays for that service. These are public, versioned gRPC APIs shipped with client SDKs in Go, Python, and TypeScript, and they sit directly in the critical path of every plan sponsor and partner application built on Helm.
We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to serve as the technical lead for our public API surface area. You'll own the architecture of provider search, ranking, and copay lookup, and you'll help set the bar for how we design, version, and scale APIs and SDKs that external engineering teams depend on. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you'll be writing and reviewing code and designs, while also setting technical direction, driving execution, mentoring engineers, and scaling the team.

Responsibilies

• Drive technical direction, implementation, and production support for the client-facing gRPC APIs and SDKs powering provider search, ranking, and dynamic copay lookups.
• Drive public API design decisions that hold up over years, not just sprints: versioning, backward compatibility, field masks, CEL-based filtering, error semantics, and gRPC status code conventions that external developers can build reliable integrations against.
• Design and evolve the ranking and steerage logic that decides which providers and specialties surface first, balancing relevance, network status, cost, client overrides, and plan-specific incentives.
• Design for scale and reliability under real production load: geofenced queries, rate limiting, retry and timeout budgets, and graceful degradation when upstream dependencies are slow or unavailable.
• Partner with product and partner engineering teams to shape the external SDK and developer experience, projects, and roadmap.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years building backend services and distributed systems.
• Deep experience with search systems and architecture at scale - you've built or evolved a production search or ranking system, and understand the tradeoffs between recall, precision, and latency at high query volume.
• Experience across multiple search architectures & paradigms — keyword/lexical search, vector/embedding-based retrieval, and LLM-driven query understanding or reranking — and a point of view on when to reach for each.
• A track record shipping public APIs and SDKs: versioning, backward compatibility, and multi-language client libraries external developers can rely on.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical lead: setting architectural direction, writing clear design docs, and raising the bar for engineers around you, while influencing without authority.
• Experience running GCP data infrastructure at scale — AlloyDB/Postgres, BigQuery, Bigtable — and good instincts for matching store to access pattern.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience with provider search, clinical/specialty matching, network steerage, or benefits/copay logic in a healthcare or insurance context.
• Familiarity with geospatial query patterns (geofencing, distance-based ranking) at scale.
• Experience building retrieval evaluation frameworks — knowing how actually to measure whether search results are "good."
• Experience in Go, with real gRPC and protobuf experience in production.
• Terraform/Terraform Cloud
• Start-up experience

Characteristics

• Ownership that shows up before you're asked — you protect the systems you own and see problems through.
• Mission-driven — motivated by making healthcare simpler and more transparent
• Curiosity that digs past the first plausible explanation, and the self-motivation to raise the next hard problem before it's urgent.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving team where requirements evolve quickly

Internal Tools/Technology

• Cursor / Linear / GitHub / Notion / Whimsical
• Slack / Google Workspace / Zoom
• Incident.io / Sentry
• 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

• Bonus + equity
• 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.