Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Clinical Ink is a global life science company focused on unlocking clinical discovery through data and technology. They are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical direction and architecture of their platform, ensuring reliability and observability while collaborating with cross-functional teams to implement effective solutions.
Responsibilities
- Own the backend and platform architecture: service boundaries, the modular/domain-aligned design, data flow, tenant isolation, and the public API surface the mobile app and integrations depend on
- Author and steward architecture and design records — intended-use statements, system/software requirements, ADRs — and keep them traceable through to verification. Make the architecture legible to everyone who builds on it
- Own the infrastructure and production-reliability backbone: infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), the AWS runtime (ECS Fargate, RDS), CI/CD pipelines, and the security posture (secrets, IAM, least-privilege, HIPAA controls)
- Set the observability and operability bar: SLOs/SLIs and error budgets; metrics, traces, and logs (CloudWatch, Sentry, OpenTelemetry); actionable alerting; and a humane, well-designed on-call. Design systems to be operated, not just shipped
- Drive the build-vs-buy and significant-change decisions, and weigh each against phase impact (consumer → sponsor trials → SaMD)
- Set the bar for correctness and safety as design inputs: scoring parity across implementations, idempotency and retries in integrations, encryption and least-privilege, and the controls that prove the code is right
- Go deep where it matters — design and build the hardest backend pieces yourself (services, data contracts, third-party adapters), and review the rest
- Multiply the team with AI-augmented workflows: design the agentic patterns, skills, and guardrails the team uses to build faster without lowering the bar
- Partner with the Director and regulatory/clinical stakeholders to turn product and compliance intent into a buildable, defensible technical plan
Skills
- Deep backend engineering experience (we use Python / FastAPI / SQLAlchemy / Postgres on AWS; equivalent depth in another modern stack transfers) and a track record of owning architecture for a non-trivial system
- Demonstrated ability to design distributed/service systems: API design, data modeling, async/eventing, integration patterns (OAuth, webhooks, retries, idempotency)
- Owned production reliability for a real system — you've designed for observability, set SLOs, carried a pager, and made infrastructure/IaC calls (Terraform / AWS or equivalent). You treat 'how it runs and how we know' as part of the architecture
- A genuine drive to build and ship — you bias toward working software and measurable impact, and you bring others with you
- Fluency with AI coding agents as part of how you work, plus the judgment to verify and own what they produce
- Clear technical writing — you make complex systems understandable to engineers, clinicians, and executives alike
- Health / regulated / safety-critical software (SaMD, IEC 62304, ISO 14971, HIPAA, FDA pathways)
- Healthcare data and interoperability (FHIR, wearables — Withings / Polar / Whoop / Fitbit, Apple Health / Health Connect)
- Data/analytics at scale (Snowflake, dbt, de-identification pipelines)
- Mobile-adjacent experience (Flutter) or on-device scoring
Company Overview
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