Founding Backend Engineer

The gap no one has filled

Every complex system in America has a profession whose job it is to be your trusted guide. You have a lawyer for legal. An accountant for taxes. A financial advisor for your money. Healthcare, a trillion-dollar industry that's arguably the most complex and touches every single family, leaves us on our own.

99% of care happens when someone steps outside the four walls of a doctor's office. Hera is creating a new profession in healthcare to fill that gap: the Hero, a dedicated senior care expert for your family. Our Heroes educate, coordinate, and advocate for the most vulnerable population in the healthcare system. We're covered by insurance, so we can serve every family in America.

Building the most trusted interface of healthcare

We are in the business of trust.

We're designing for the most emotionally charged moments of our customers' lives. The bar isn't just delight, it's trust. Hera's brand promise is simple: care that would only be great enough for our own parents. This promise is our moat.

It's what physicians refer to, families buy, what Heroes deliver, and what the product must unlock and enforce at every touchpoint.

The supply challenge

There aren't enough experts to serve every family who needs us. The bottleneck isn't demand, it's supply.

In order to scale to all of America, we need to unbundle expertise from the human and broaden the aperture of who can become a Hero. Anyone that can foster human connection should be able to become a Hero with Hera. In that world, our supply challenge becomes how we uphold our brand promise across every touchpoint with our customers.

Our product challenge

We believe the best software is invisible. We serve two audiences that most tech startups never build for: social workers and nurses as well as aging parents and their adult children. Trust is built or broken in every interaction, and the product is where that trust lives. We need to equip our Heroes to deliver expert-level care at every interaction.

Healthcare navigation runs on tribal knowledge: one social worker knows the trick to expediting Medicaid in New York, another knows which home visiting physical therapist families actually love. This expertise lives in people's heads, fragmented across thousands of practitioners. We're building the product that changes that.

Our platform captures every interaction, every solved problem, every hard-won insight from our expert care managers in the field - and turns it into compounding intelligence that makes every user on the platform smarter. Think Waymo's approach to autonomy: high-quality human experts do the driving today, and every mile they log trains the system so that tomorrow, anyone - even someone with zero healthcare background - can perform like a 20-year veteran. The engineering challenge is building a platform deeply entwined and additive to the care management workflow with no lost nuance and perfect behavioral capture. From there we build a knowledge system that knows what to trust, what's gone stale, what's local vs. universal, and how to surface exactly the right insight at the right moment. Get it right, and you've built the platform that finally scales healthcare expertise beyond the lucky few who happen to know the right person.

Our founding team

We've raised 34M from Accel and Bain Capital Ventures and 10'xed revenue over the last 6 months organically through close partnerships with Weill Cornell, NYU Langone, UCSF, USC, and Mount Sinai. Chief of Geriatrics at Weill Cornell and Director of Geriatrics at NYU Langone have joined us as clinical advisors. CFO of Mount Sinai has invested in us.
The customer feedback is the most positive our team has seen in our careers. Along the way, we threw an art show for an 88 year old artist that went viral and a talent show where every act is over 65.
You'll build Hera alongside co-founders Jenny, Myles & Connie and a team from Palantir and Headway. We are in person in NYC. Read our story and watch our launch video here.

The role

We are hiring for a founding backend software engineer to build the systems that power Hera's care platform with rigor, reliability, and long-term scalability. This role is for an engineer who cares deeply about sound systems design, high-quality architecture, and getting the details right in an environment where trust, data sensitivity, and operational correctness matter.

What you'll do

• Design and build core backend systems. You will architect and implement the infrastructure, services, and internal platform capabilities that underpin Hera's product and operations.
• Build for reliability and correctness. You will create systems that are fault-tolerant, idempotent, and thoughtfully designed to handle sensitive workflows safely.
• Own critical data and infrastructure decisions. You will help shape how Hera handles complex workflows involving medical, billing, operational, and user data across the platform.
• Develop robust APIs and service architecture. You will build well-crafted consumer-grade APIs and contribute to a scalable, maintainable systems foundation.
• Raise the bar on engineering rigor. You will bring strong opinions around unit testing, system performance, design quality, and technical standards across the backend.

Who you are

• Strong backend and infrastructure fundamentals. You have experience designing systems with sound architecture, strong performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Attention to detail. You care deeply about correctness, resilience, and the details that matter when building systems that touch sensitive or high-stakes workflows.
• Relevant systems experience. Experience with cloud infrastructure, multiple database types, consumer-scale APIs, SDKs, and service-oriented architecture is highly relevant.
• Security and compliance awareness. Experience working with permissions, role-based access controls, security-sensitive flows, compliance-minded systems, or other trust-critical infrastructure is a major plus.
• Ownership and autonomy. You are self-directed, opinionated in a healthy way, and excited to take responsibility for major technical decisions as an early engineer.
• Technical fluency. AWS or similar cloud experience, SQL and non-SQL database experience, and strong comfort with modern backend development practices are highly relevant for this role.

What we value

• Worthy of our parents: We don't leave the 20% behind, because that applies to someone's mother. Quality isn't a constraint we tolerate on the path to growth. Quality is the strategy.
• Collaboration must be an accelerant. Not everything will be collaborated on and that's fine. We assume good intent always and push the ball forward.
• Celebrate human. Humans are at the heart of everything we do: every product decision, every Hero we choose to hire, every person we bring onto the team. For us, empathy is fuel to move with urgency because we know every single day matters for those we serve. We look for missionaries not mercenaries.
• Enjoy the uphill. Wrestling problems this hard, in an industry this broken, is a privilege most people never get. We're excited for the summit but the joy is in the climb: figuring out how to take down the beast, one foot in front of the other. If the hard part isn't what's pulling you, this might be the wrong climb.
• Attack. Nothing is created in this world without an extraordinary amount of effort. In order to will the change we want to see in the world, we attack problems and play offense. We're here to win to ensure our customers get the world they deserve.

Compensation

We pay at the top of market with founding-level equity. People who deliver outsized outcomes should be rewarded with outsized upside.