Backend Engineer

Job Title: Backend Engineer
Employment Status: Full-time
Location: This position will be based in our Boston, Massachusetts office with a hybrid schedule (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday in office, Wednesday WFH option).
Compensation: $130,000 - $150,000 base salary + bonus + equity
*compensation dependent on related experience level

About Ketryx:

Ketryx is an AI software platform that enables healthcare life sciences companies to ship life-saving regulated products in weeks instead of years.

Since launch, Ketryx already touches the lives of 100M patients and powers all of the world's top five medical device manufacturers. Backed by Lightspeed Ventures, our founders are the former Head of AI at Amgen and CTO of Wolfram Cloud.

Healthcare and life sciences is just the beginning for us. Automotive, aerospace, energy — if it's regulated, it's because society decided it matters. These products move humanity, shape our future, and are safety-critical. Come join us and help build the AI platform to power safe innovation.

About the Role:

Join us in an exciting opportunity as a Backend Engineer, where you will become an integral part of an extraordinary team of engineers dedicated to shaping the future of software at Ketryx. In this dynamic role, you will contribute to a small, highly motivated team, actively steering projects to successful completion.

In this role, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the technological landscape, assuming ownership of critical technology decisions and roadmaps. With a self-starting attitude and a robust hands-on mentality, you will be at the forefront of tackling complex problems and driving innovation. Embracing agile working models, you will foster ideation, envision future possibilities, and address detailed improvements concurrently, contributing to Ketryx's commitment to reinventing how medical device manufacturers bring life-saving innovations to market. If you're reliable, detail-oriented, and ready to contribute to a global team, you could be a part of our mission to create safe and reliable medical software!

About You:

The ideal candidate is someone who possesses a deep passion for software and a profound desire to contribute to enhancing patient treatments through technological innovation. Your innate inquisitiveness, coupled with an unwavering enthusiasm for challenging assumptions, sets you apart. With excellent communication skills in both spoken and written English, you thrive in collaborative environments, where the exchange of ideas is paramount.

As a self-starter, you relish the opportunity to excel in a fast-paced startup environment, taking ownership of technology decisions and roadmaps. Your commitment to driving innovation aligns seamlessly with the ethos of our team, making you an invaluable asset in shaping the future of software at Ketryx. You are driven by a genuine love for software, a desire to improve patient outcomes, and the excitement of navigating cutting-edge challenges.

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas (including H-1B), F-1 visas, or Optional Practical Training (OPT) status at this time.

Responsibilities:

• Backend Development
  Build features end to end — API design, business logic, and integrations between the Ketryx platform and external systems and workflows. Contribute to improving latency, throughput, and fault tolerance across the backend stack.
• Database Work
  Design and evolve PostgreSQL schemas, write efficient queries, and apply indexing strategies to keep the database performant as the product grows.
• Maintainable Systems
  Write clean, well-tested code and contribute to standards around migrations, documentation, and testing.
• Operational Reliability
  Participate in monitoring, debugging, and incident response. Help identify performance bottlenecks and reliability issues, and contribute fixes.
• Frontend When Needed
  Take features across the finish line in our React/Next.js frontend — you won't own the design system, but you should be comfortable building the UI for the backend work you ship.
• Collaboration
  Engage directly with customers, collect feedback, and shape product features with designers, product managers, and the Boston team (Pre-Sales, Sales, Post-Sales, Marketing). Provide technical support to customers alongside Client Operations.

Required Skills:

• Ability to work in a fast-moving startup environment, taking ownership of features and pushing them forward
• 3+ years of full-time industry experience building production web applications, with a focus on backend development
• Solid skills in TypeScript
• Experience with PostgreSQL or a comparable relational database: schema design, writing efficient queries, and basic performance tuning
• Working knowledge of React, enough to build and modify UI for the features you own
• Solid understanding of backend maintainability, including refactoring and managing technical debt
• Comfortable collaborating across teams in English and participating in technical discussions and design review.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with Prisma and Next.js
• Experience with GraphQL (urql or Apollo)
• Familiarity with AWS services like S3, RDS, and ECS
• Familiarity with Docker in production or near-production environments
• Strong testing habits (Vitest, Playwright, Cucumber)
• Prior experience with logging and observability tools such as Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, or Sentry
• Experience building AI-related features, particularly for large language models
• Experience working in regulated industries like healthcare or finance.

Our Tech Stack

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Tailwind
• Backend: PostgreSQL, Redis, GraphQL, Prisma
• Testing: Vitest, Playwright, Cucumber
• Infrastructure: AWS (e.g. S3, RDS, ECS), Datadog
• Collaboration: Slack, GitHub, Figma, Jira, Confluence