Staff Product Engineer -API Platform

Role Description

We are seeking a Staff Product Engineer who combines strong backend engineering expertise, product judgment, API platform experience, and technical leadership.

In this role, you will lead the development and evolution of Vitable’s Benefits Partner API Platform . This platform enables employers, brokers, benefits administrators, payroll providers, and other strategic partners to integrate directly with Vitable’s benefits infrastructure. It powers critical workflows such as:

• Eligibility
• Enrollment
• Employee and dependent management
• Benefit access
• Billing-adjacent data flows
• Reporting
• Partner-facing operational automation

You will be responsible for building a platform that is reliable, secure, intuitive, well-documented, and easy for partners to adopt. This includes:

• Thoughtful API design
• Authentication and authorization patterns
• Sandbox environments
• Developer documentation
• Observability
• Versioning strategies
• Internal tooling that helps Vitable scale partner integrations without scaling operational complexity

You will work closely with engineering, product, operations, customer success, sales, implementation, and business stakeholders to solve ambiguous, mission-critical problems. You’ll be expected to:

• Deeply understand our partners, customers, members, and internal teams
• Make thoughtful technical tradeoffs
• Lead projects from problem definition through production launch and ongoing operation

This is primarily a backend role, but we are looking for someone comfortable working across the stack when needed to deliver complete product outcomes.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Experience designing, building, maintaining, and operating production APIs or integration platforms used by external customers, partners, or third-party developers
• Experience building production systems where reliability, correctness, security, observability, and maintainability are critical
• Proven ability to independently lead complex projects with measurable business, customer, partner, or operational impact
• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and ownership mindset
• Experience working cross-functionally with product, operations, customer success, implementation, sales, compliance, or business stakeholders
• Strong product judgment and ability to translate ambiguous partner or business needs into pragmatic technical solutions
• Startup or high-growth company experience is a plus
• Experience in healthcare, benefits administration, insurance, HR tech, payroll, fintech, or another regulated/integration-heavy domain is a plus

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Python
• Strong understanding of backend system design, software architecture, APIs, data modeling, and distributed systems fundamentals
• Strong knowledge of API platform best practices, including API key management, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, versioning, idempotency, pagination, error design, sandbox environments, and developer documentation
• Experience designing and maintaining REST APIs or other external-facing integration surfaces
• Experience building resilient systems with robust monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, and incident response practices
• Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL
• Comfortable using AI coding tools and agents to accelerate development while maintaining strong technical judgment and ownership of decisions

Benefits

• 100% Silver Plan medical coverage — plus dental and vision
• Vitable Primary Care membership — the same care we give our members, yours too
• 401(k) and life insurance
• Unlimited PTO — and we actually mean it
• Remote-first — work from wherever you do your best thinking
• MacBook and home office setup stipend — the gear you need to do great work
• Competitive equity — you're building something real, you should own a piece of it