Backend Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Backend Engineer (Python) based in Spain.
As a Backend Engineer, you will help develop and scale an AI-powered voice platform designed to improve healthcare access and support for adults aged 65 and older. You will build the Python services and backend workflows that enable intelligent patient conversations, coordinate follow-up care, and connect patients with the right clinical resources. Working at the intersection of backend engineering, applied AI, and healthcare technology, you will contribute to features such as appointment scheduling, medication refill requests, and post-discharge support. You will take ownership of well-defined projects from technical design through deployment, collaborating closely with engineers, product specialists, designers, and clinical operations teams. Within a small, distributed European engineering team, you will have the opportunity to influence product reliability, data security, and the quality of patient experiences. This role offers meaningful technical challenges, hands?on exposure to modern AI technologies, and the chance to build software with a tangible impact on people's health and well?being.
Accountabilities:
Develop and maintain backend services:
Build and extend Python-based APIs, data models, and background workflows supporting patient enrollment, call scheduling, communication preferences, and follow-up processes.
Enhance AI-powered voice workflows:
Improve the backend systems that support an AI voice agent, enabling personalized patient conversations, access to relevant context, and integration with appropriate tools across multiple languages and care programs.
Integrate healthcare systems:
Connect voice workflows with electronic health records and clinical data platforms, ensuring conversations are informed by relevant patient information and that patient requests reach the appropriate care teams.
Automate patient care coordination:
Develop reliable workflows that help patients schedule appointments, request medication refills, and receive appropriate follow-up, with clear handoffs and visibility into subsequent actions.
Build resilient distributed systems:
Design backend processes that handle interrupted calls, duplicate webhooks, external service failures, timeouts, retries, and other operational edge cases without compromising data integrity.
Improve system reliability and performance:
Write automated tests, participate in code reviews, investigate production issues, and use logs and metrics to identify and resolve technical problems.
Support cloud deployment and service integration:
Deploy and maintain containerized services in a cloud environment, ensuring compatibility across independently deployed components and supporting safe, incremental releases.
Protect sensitive patient information:
Incorporate privacy, security, and responsible data handling into everyday engineering decisions, particularly when working with healthcare records and personal information.
Collaborate across distributed teams:
Work with engineering, product, design, and clinical operations colleagues to understand requirements, communicate technical decisions, and deliver improvements aligned with patient and care?team needs.
Contribute to continuous improvement:
Take ownership of defined features from technical planning through production deployment, incorporating feedback and refining existing workflows to improve reliability and usability.
Requirements:
Production engineering experience:
Demonstrated experience building, shipping, and maintaining backend services in production. Practical ownership and the quality of your work matter more than a specific number of years of experience.
Strong Python skills:
Proficiency in Python and experience developing HTTP APIs with FastAPI or a comparable framework, including comfort working with asynchronous programming.
Database expertise:
Practical experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database, including data modeling, schema design, migrations, and maintaining data integrity.
API and integration experience:
Experience integrating third-party services and developing background jobs or queue-based workflows, with an understanding of timeouts, retries, duplicate events, and partial failures.
Sound engineering practices:
Ability to write readable, maintainable code, create useful automated tests, participate in code reviews, and debug issues using logs, metrics, and other observability tools.
Cloud and deployment knowledge:
Experience deploying containerized applications to a cloud platform and understanding the operational considerations involved in running production services.
End-to-end ownership:
Ability to take a clearly defined problem from initia