Founding Backend Engineer at Hellohera in New York City, NY

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 closed a 7M seed round led by Accel and 10’xed revenue over the last 6 months organically through close partnerships with Weill Cornell, NYU Langone, and Mount Sinai. We’ve been doing fun things in the community along the way (threw an art show for an 88 year old artist that went viral https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2026/02/19/88-year-old-brooklyn-painter-sells-art-for-the-first-time) and the customer feedback is the most positive our team has seen in our careers. You’ll build Hera alongside co-founders Jenny https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennydlee/, Myles https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylesnovick/ & Connie https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingyi-connie-kang/ and a team from Headway and Palantir. We are in person in NYC. Read our story and watch our launch video here https://hellohera.com/about. In a world of growing cynicism we chase hard truths, give a damn, and build. Our entire team believes truth is in the field. This means we are side by side with our Heroes everyday, learning what it takes to do the job and do it well. We are high autonomy and trust. There is no space for micromanagement, if you see a problem or think of a solution, you are empowered to run at it wholeheartedly and know that the team has your back. We are creative in our bones. For the first time in many years, we are seeing the genesis of a new profession of a profound scale and importance; it’s on us to define what it can and should look like. Join our Founding Team to impact real lives We are looking for ambitious and relentless engineers to join us on this mission. Whereas at other companies you may be working on the next widget, analytics suite, dev tooling, or b2b revolution, what we are trying to do is as tangible as it gets. We serve the everyday people in society that are most sorely in need of help and who have been least addressed by the technological revolution and developer brainpower of the past decades. We want to bring the highest quality builders to bear on this. When you solve a hard problem, you will know that you’ve empowered some of the most selfless members of our society to tangibly impact the lives of some of those most in need. You will also be rewarded with harder problems. Our promise is we will stretch your limits, and trust you to own unreasonably substantial outcomes. 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. What we are looking for - 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. Compensation We pay at the top of market with founding-level equity. People who deliver outsized outcomes should be rewarded with outsized upside.