Full-Stack Software Engineer (Backend-Leaning)

Job Description

Job Description

About Collate

Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.

Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.

We’re an elite team, with $125M in funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, CRV, Conviction, Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join an early-stage company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Full-Stack Engineer (Backend-leaning) to design and build the systems and user-facing features that power Collate. You’ll spend most of your time on backend challenges—APIs, services, and infrastructure—but you’ll also ship end-to-end features.

This is an opportunity to help define our technical foundation, collaborate directly with design and product, and shape how our users experience Collate from day one.

Modern Tech Stack

Collate uses a modern tech stack, targeting a highly reliable and available platform. We use Go for scalable backend services, TypeScript & React for frontend development, and Python for AI & ML services. Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS with Kubernetes for orchestration and Terraform + Argo CD for configuration management. Key systems include S3, PostgreSQL, Kafka, OpenSearch, LLMs, and other AI models.

What You’ll Do

• Design and scale backend services, APIs, and data pipelines that power Collate’s products.
• Deliver end-to-end, production-ready features in partnership with product, design, and AI engineering.
• Balance iteration speed with technical rigor to ensure systems scale reliably.
• Create internal tools and workflows that accelerate engineering productivity.
• Share responsibility for production systems, including participating in on-call rotation.

What We’re Looking For

• Have experience building across the stack, with deeper strength in backend systems.
• Enjoy taking features from idea → backend architecture → polished UI.
• Care deeply about both technical robustness and the end user experience.
• Are motivated by ambiguity, eager to pick up missing knowledge, and excited to solve novel problems.
• Value speed, pragmatism, and scrappiness but know when to design for robustness.
• Have been an early-stage engineer or startup founder—or aspire to work at that level of ownership.

Why Join Collate?

Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.

Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.

Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.

Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career-defining impact.

The base salary range for this role is depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco)

SWE: $158-200K; Senior SWE: $188-250K; Staff SWE: $228-296K; Principal $275-325K

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.