Backend Engineer (SF/On-site)

About Soulside

Soulside AI is transforming how behavioral health organizations operate, unlocking massive efficiency gains through AI. Our platform cuts documentation time by 80%—turning 3+ hours of daily paperwork into 30 minutes—so these organizations can focus resources on patient care, growth, and innovation. The impact is immediate: better outcomes, reduced costs, and the ability to serve more patients without adding administrative overhead.

We're scaling fast and building the infrastructure that will power mental healthcare for decades. This is your chance to join as a founding engineer and shape a platform that every behavioral health organization will depend on. You'll build technology that directly improves millions of lives while capturing an enormous market opportunity. The timing is perfect, the problem is real, and the upside is massive.

Why this role matters:

Shape the technical foundation of a company revolutionizing mental health care

Work directly with founders on architecture decisions that will scale with our growth

Build distributed systems handling clinical healthcare data using Spring Boot & Kafka

Own major features end-to-end with full accountability for outcomes

Our momentum speaks for itself:

• ✅ Backed by Counterpart Ventures, GreyMatter Capital, Sarah Smith Fund & Kaya Ventures
• ✅ UCSF Rosenman Healthtech Innovator 2024
• ✅ OneMind Accelerator 2024 & PeakXV Spark Program
• ✅ Global Top 10 - Confluent Data Streaming Challenge

The Role

We're seeking a Backend Engineer to join our core team as we build technology that transforms behavioral health care. As one of our early engineering hires, you'll have outsized impact on our technical architecture, product direction, and company culture. You'll be responsible for designing and implementing scalable backend systems that process sensitive healthcare data, working with distributed architectures that support real-time patient interactions, and contributing to AI-driven clinical tools that directly impact patient outcomes.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a company that's revolutionizing mental health care, with significant equity upside and the autonomy to make architectural decisions that will scale with our growth.

What You'll Do

Architect and develop core backend services using Spring Boot that power our AI-driven platform

Design and implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability infrastructure using Prometheus and Grafana

Configure and manage AWS scaling policies to ensure system reliability and cost optimization

Build distributed systems leveraging message queues and streaming platforms (SQS, Kafka, Kinesis) for high-volume asynchronous workloads

Implement robust data reliability strategies including redundancy, failure handling, and disaster recovery

Design and optimize LLM integration pipelines, including prompt engineering, usage monitoring, and quality assurance

Establish security best practices using Spring Security, implement RBAC, and ensure HIPAA compliance

Model and optimize complex clinical and operational workflows, translating domain requirements into well-structured, maintainable backend processes

Make foundational technical decisions that will scale as we grow from startup to industry leader

Collaborate directly with founders and clinical teams to translate healthcare needs into scalable technical solutions

Own major product features end-to-end, from architecture to deployment.

Who You Are

Systems Thinker: You naturally reason about distributed systems, failure modes, and data consistency. You design for what goes wrong, not just what goes right.

Reliability-Focused: You believe monitoring and alerting aren't afterthoughts—they're core engineering deliverables. You sleep better when dashboards are green and alerts are actionable.

Problem Solver: You are resourceful and can architect smart solutions when faced with complex, non-standard requirements or scaling challenges.

Ownership Mindset: You are happy to roll up your sleeves to handle both high-level architecture decisions and the critical operational details that keep a production system running.

Required Qualifications

2+ years of software engineering experience

Deep expertise in Spring Boot framework and Java ecosystem for building production-grade applications

Proficiency in monitoring and observability tools, specifically Prometheus and Grafana for creating dashboards and alerts

Strong experience with AWS services including provisioning and managing auto-scaling policies, EC2, ECS/EKS

Proven expertise in architecting scalable distributed systems using message queues and streaming platforms (SQS, Kafka, Kinesis)

Experience implementing data reliability patterns including redundancy, circuit breakers, retry mechanisms, and graceful failure handling

Hands-on experience with LLM technologies including prompt engineering, usage monitoring, and quality metrics

Strong security engineering background with Spring Security, implementing RBAC, and healthcare compliance standards

Experience with process modeling and translating complex domain workflows into backend logic

Demonstrated ability to build systems that handle asynchronous workloads at scale

Experience with event-driven architectures and microservices patterns

Ability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment

Excellent communication and collaboration abilities

Bonus Points

Experience in audio/signal processing

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) experience and principles

Advanced Confluent Kafka platform expertise

Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform

Experience with additional cloud platforms (GCP, Azure)

Background in real-time systems or media processing

Healthcare technology or HIPAA compliance experience

Experience with AI/ML model deployment and monitoring

Open source contributions

What We Offer

Salary range of $180,000–$250,000, plus equity with significant upside potential as a founding team member

Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance

Direct access to founders and influence on company direction

Professional development budget and conference attendance

Modern tech stack and complete autonomy over technical decisions

Opportunity to build something meaningful that impacts mental health at scale

How to Apply

Send us your resume along with a brief note about what excites you about this role and any relevant projects you've worked on. We'd particularly love to hear about your experience with distributed systems, monitoring infrastructure, and any work you've done with LLMs or AI systems in production environments.