Lead Software Engineer, Backend

Software Engineering Manager/Tech Lead

Founded in 2021 and offered as an employer benefit, Cylinder (formerly Vivante Health) delivers personalized, clinician-backed care to those suffering from digestive issues through its virtual health platform. Cylinder's tech-forward, human-first program connects members to the right level of support at the right time through an easy interface, bringing the healthcare ecosystem together to align around member needs. Cylinder's dedicated care teams help members proactively address their gut health from every angle – decreasing costs, reducing absenteeism, and improving their quality of life, at scale. Cylinder's vision is to create a world where people receive convenient, personalized, and affordable access to the quality digestive healthcare they need to improve their overall health.

As a Software Engineering Manager/Tech Lead at Cylinder, you will be a technical leader and owner of feature delivery, helping build and scale our digestive health platform. You'll be a hands-on technical leader — comfortable jumping into architecture discussions, code reviews, and technical decisions. A meaningful part of this role involves leading your team in building AI-powered features, collaborating with our data and clinical teams on LLM-based experiences and model integrations. You'll partner closely with product, clinical, and data teams to deliver high-quality software that directly improves outcomes for our members. Our backend services are developed mostly in Go and run in GKE (k8s) or directly on other GCP serverless frameworks, with GitHub and Terraform powering the DevOps environment.

The problem domain and our approach to solving it is super compelling. We're bringing together data sources that have never been joined, building models of a GI patient that have never been built, and discovering new GI health insights that help real people to manage and support their real medical conditions. It's still early enough that there's a lot of decisions and new discoveries to be made, so this is your chance to get in early and help shape our future.

We're still a small company, which means that everyone still wears a lot of hats and we need engineers who are comfortable with ambiguity and working across a wide variety of challenges. That said, our existing engineering team has built an extremely efficient working environment based on best-in-class hosted SaaS frameworks that greatly minimize the overhead in deploying and supporting software in production. We're all really passionate about improving clinical outcomes for our members and truly advancing the GI health space. Most of us also have personal (direct/family/friend) connections to GI health problems. Whatever is that fuels you, we're on a mission to build something much larger than ourselves here and looking for another partner in driving that mission forward.

Responsibilities include:

• Technical Leadership: Provide strong technical leadership and vision for your engineering squad, ensuring alignment with the company's strategic goals — and staying close enough to the code to earn your team's respect
• Technical Strategy: Collaborate with product management and other stakeholders to define and prioritize the technical roadmap, ensuring alignment with business objectives
• Technical Standards: Implement processes, tools, and practices that drive high-velocity and high-quality delivery across onshore and offshore teams
• Execution: Drive the successful delivery of software projects, including planning, resource allocation, and project management
• Quality Assurance: Grow and foster our adoption of SQA best practices to ensure high-quality deliverables
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams (Product/Clinical/Data/ClientSuccess/etc.) and communicate effectively to distill technical details into business terms
• Innovation: Encourage a culture of innovation and experimentation, staying abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies to drive product innovation
• AI Integration & Practice: Drive AI-powered feature development, responsible AI practices (including secure handling of member data and privacy in AI contexts), and adoption of AI tools to improve engineering efficiency
• Risk Management: Identify and mitigate technical risks and challenges, making data-driven decisions to achieve project success
• Continuous Improvement: Monitor and drive improvements to team and organizational performance

You'll be a good fit if you are:

• A team player. You like collaborating closely with other engineering and product managers
• Empathetic to our members' GI health conditions and are driven to improve their outcomes
• Security oriented. We take the stewardship of our customer's healthcare data seriously, and take no shortcuts to protect it
• Comfortable with a distributed workforce. We interact with each other via video chat, Slack, and other collaboration tools
• A self motivated, creative problem solver

We are proud of the team culture that we foster today, which is extremely friendly and supportive while constantly reaching to raise our own standards of engineering. We're really excited about what we're building, and usually having fun building it together. If all of that sounds fun to you too, we'd love to meet you.

Required qualifications:

• 5+ years in Software Engineering with 2+ years in an engineering leadership role, with a track record of successfully delivering complex software projects with both onshore and offshore developers
• Exceptional leadership and team-building skills, with the ability to motivate, mentor and inspire engineers in a remote setting
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with offshore developers, cross-functional teams, business partners, and vendors alike
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with backend systems, ideally in Go and/or cloud-native environments
• Experience building or integrating AI-powered features with working knowledge of responsible AI practices
• Experience building and integrating AI-assisted tools and practices into the SDLC, including engineering productivity, code generation/review, DevOps workflows, documentation, test automation, and operational governance

Desired qualifications:

• Experience in a startup environment
• Experience with medical, healthcare and/or population health data. Double bonus for familiarity with OHDSI, FHIR and/or other healthcare data standards
• Experience working in a HIPAA regulated environment (or other regulated industry) and supporting data security and privacy controls
• Familiarity with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) frameworks, including GKE, IAM, Firebase, Pub/Sub, or any others
• Familiarity with data engineering concepts and practices

Cylinder is an equal opportunity employer. We believe safe spaces where everyone can be their authentic selves is the key to a successful team so we welcome and embrace all identities, cultures, and backgrounds.