Senior Software Engineer, Data

Job Description

Job Description

Sidecar Health is redefining health insurance. Our mission is to make excellent healthcare affordable and accessible for everyone. We know that to accomplish this lofty mission, we need driven people who will make things happen.

The passionate people who make up Sidecar Health's team come from all over, with backgrounds as tech leaders, policy makers, healthcare professionals, and beyond. And they all have one thing in common—the desire to fix a broken system and make it more personalized, affordable, and transparent.

If you want to use your talents to transform healthcare in the United States, come join us!

About the Role

This is a high-impact individual contributor role on our platform team, building large-scale data pipelines and distributed systems that power Sidecar Health's core product. You'll take full ownership of complex, ambiguous problems from architecture through production — designing, shipping, and running the systems you build. If you're a strong senior engineer who thrives on end-to-end ownership and wants your work to matter in healthcare, this is the role for you.

**MUST BE BASED IN CALIFORNIA**

What You'll Do 

• Design and own high-throughput, distributed data pipelines and platform infrastructure from concept through production
• Decompose large, ambiguous initiatives into structured, executable plans that the team can move on in parallel
• Write production-grade Python — strongly typed, well-structured, and built to last — not scripts or notebooks
• Optimize SQL at scale: query tuning, data modeling, and understanding execution plans
• Architect across boundaries — defining contracts between frontend, backend services, and infrastructure
• Be a technical resource and mentor for junior engineers, and partner directly with leadership on roadmap and technical decisions
• Instrument systems for observability — knowing what to monitor, not just how to read a dashboard

What You'll Bring 

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with full ownership of production systems
• Strong proficiency in Python (mypy, Pydantic, proper abstractions) and SQL at scale
• Deep experience building and operating distributed data pipelines and event-driven architectures
• Hands-on AWS experience: Lambda, SQS, IAM, CloudWatch, and cost-aware design
• Docker as a first-class practice
• Habitual, fluent use of AI tools (Claude, Cursor, etc.) as part of your daily workflow
• Observability experience with Datadog or equivalent
• Familiarity with FastAPI, Django, SQLAlchemy, Celery, or Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CDK) is a strong plus
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field

The Reality

This is a startup. We move fast. We prioritize impact over polish. We expect:

• Bias for action — ship, learn, iterate
• Ownership — you design it, build it, run it
• Pragmatism — solve real problems, not theoretical ones
• Resilience — ambiguity comes with the territory

Healthcare is complex and broken. The work matters.

What You'll Get 

• Competitive salary, bonus opportunity, and equity package
• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits
• A 401k retirement plan
• Paid vacation and company holidays
• Opportunity to make an impact at a rapidly growing mission-driven company transforming healthcare in the U.S.

Sidecar Health is an Equal Opportunity employer committed to building a diverse team. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.