Staff Platform Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Why Charlie Health?

Millions of people across the country are navigating mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and eating disorders, but too often, they're met with barriers to care. From limited local options and long wait times to treatment that lacks personalization, behavioral healthcare can leave people feeling unseen and unsupported.

Charlie Health exists to change that. Our mission is to connect the world to life-saving behavioral health treatment. We deliver personalized, virtual care rooted in connection—between clients and clinicians, care teams, loved ones, and the communities that support them. By focusing on people with complex needs, we're expanding access to meaningful care and driving better outcomes from the comfort of home.

As a rapidly growing organization, we're reaching more communities every day and building a team that's redefining what behavioral health treatment can look like. If you're ready to use your skills to drive lasting change and help more people access the care they deserve, we'd love to meet you.

About the Role

Core Platform is a platform team. Our customers are Charlie Health's other engineering teams, and our job is to make them faster, safer, and more consistent. We don't ship product features. We build the patterns, services, and guardrails that other engineering teams depend on.

As a Staff Platform Engineer on Core Platform, you will own one of the primitives at the heart of Charlie Health's replatforming: the federated GraphQL front door, the event substrate that carries every signal, the identity layer for humans and AI agents, or the real-time world model state layer that gives our services and agents a live picture of care. You will take your area from design through production operation, and the patterns you set become the team's paved roads.

Every engineer is a tech lead, and as a Staff engineer you are a domain owner: people come to you with the hardest technical decisions in your area, and you make calls that hold up across team boundaries. You will work alongside a team of experienced engineers who own the platform primitives. We build with AI as the default. Specs are the primary artifact, agents draft most of the implementation, and spec quality is the clearest craft signal at this level. The quality gates this team builds are what make agent-written code safe in a HIPAA-regulated clinical business.

Responsibilities

• Own one or more platform primitives end to end, from architecture and build through production operation and long-term evolution
• Build the deterministic quality gates that let agent-written code ship safely: automated end-to-end testing, golden test datasets, spec templates, and schema change safety
• Deliver core services on the team's own paved roads, finding the potholes before any product squad does
• Write specs that name invariants, error cases, security implications, and acceptance criteria, and orchestrate agent swarms on hard multi-system work
• Coach Senior engineers and product squad engineers on spec writing, agent orchestration, and platform patterns
• Define the reliability conventions for your area: SLO definitions, observability standards, and incident response practice, including a seat in the on-call rotation
• Steward the security and compliance posture of your primitive, and stay aware of what it costs to run
• Partner with product squads as they federate into the supergraph and adopt the event substrate during the migration onto the new platform
• Design cross-service patterns that product squads adopt, and treat adoption as the measure of success rather than delivery alone
• Document the standards in your domain as architecture decision records and bring them through our Architecture Advice Guild

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including several years designing and operating distributed systems or platform components that other teams build on
• Depth in at least one of these areas, enough to own it end to end: GraphQL federation, real-time stream processing (Flink, Spark, KsqlDB, or similar), graph databases (Memgraph, Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, Dgraph, or similar), or authorization systems with ReBAC and RBAC models (Zanzibar, OpenFGA, Cedar, or similar)
• Experience with skills, MCPs, harnesses, agentic tooling ecosystems, or agent orchestration for software development
• You build with AI agents as part of your daily work. You write specs agents can implement, run agents for real delivery, and know where agent output needs human judgment
• Experience with data modeling for systems of record, including safe schema changes against live production data
• Proficiency in the stack we run: TypeScript and/or Python services, Postgres, and AWS managed primitives
• A track record of driving workstreams that span multiple engineers and quarters without people authority
• Comfort operating production critical-path systems, including on-call, in a regulated environment
• Clear, direct communication with engineers, product partners, and leadership
• This is a remote role. Our teams work across time zones and are available during core meeting hours (12PM to 5PM EST)

Nice to Haves

• Event streaming systems such as Kafka, including schema governance and production operation
• Healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7v2) and engineering in a HIPAA-regulated environment
• A strangler-fig migration or large platform cutover you contributed to
• Time on a platform or developer experience team
• Fluency with domain-driven design or event storming

Benefits

Charlie Health is pleased to offer comprehensive benefits to all full-time, exempt employees. Read more about our benefits here.

The total target base compensation for this role will be between $185,000 and $265,000 per year at the commencement of employment. Please note, pay will be determined on an individualized basis and will be impacted by location, experience, expertise, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. Further, cash compensation is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may include stock options and other Charlie Health-sponsored benefits.

Our Values

• Connection: Care deeply & inspire hope.
• Congruence: Stay curious & heed the evidence.
• Commitment: Act with urgency & don't give up.

Please do not call our public clinical admissions line in regard to this or any other job posting.

Please be cautious of potential recruitment fraud. If you are interested in exploring opportunities at Charlie Health, please go directly to our Careers Page: -openings. Charlie Health will never ask you to pay a fee or download software as part of the interview process with our company. In addition, Charlie Health will not ask for your personal banking information until you have signed an offer of employment and completed onboarding paperwork that is provided by our People Operations team. All communications with Charlie Health Talent and People Operations professionals will only be sent from @charliehealth.com email addresses. Legitimate emails will never originate from gmail.com, yahoo.com, or other commercial email services.

Recruiting agencies, please do not submit unsolicited referrals for this or any open role. We have a roster of agencies with whom we partner, and we will not pay any fee associated with unsolicited referrals.

At Charlie Health, we value being an Equal Opportunity Employer. We strive to cultivate an environment where individuals can be their authentic selves. Being an Equal Opportunity Employer means every member of our team feels as though they are supported and belong. We value diverse perspectives to help us provide essential mental health and substance use disorder treatments to all young people.

Charlie Health applicants are assessed solely on their qualifications for the role, without regard to disability or need for accommodation.

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