Senior Backend Engineer - Data Platform

Sword Health is shifting healthcare from human-first to AI-first through its AI Care platform, making world-class healthcare available anytime, anywhere, while significantly reducing costs for payers, self-insured employers, national health systems, and other healthcare organizations. Sword began by reinventing pain care with AI at its core, and has since expanded into women’s health, movement health, and more recently mental health. Since 2020, more than 700,000 members across three continents have completed 10 million AI sessions, helping Sword's 1,000+ enterprise clients avoid over $1 billion in unnecessary healthcare costs. Backed by 42 clinical studies and over 44 patents, Sword Health has raised more than $500 million from leading investors, including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Transformation Capital, and Founders Fund. Learn more at www.swordhealth.com.

At Sword, data powers our mission to build a pain-free world. The Platform Team is building the infrastructure that makes this possible, high-performance APIs enabling self-service data access for clinical, operations, and AI teams. We're moving from a traditional data warehouse to an end-to-end platform, and this role is central to that transformation.

Design and build the APIs that make data accessible across Sword. You'll own critical platform services, implement resilient workflows, and collaborate with Data Engineers to define contracts that scale. Requires production API experience and comfort working in regulated environments.

What you’ll be doing:

• Design and build high-performance APIs in Go or Typescript, starting with Publish API, then Serving API and Jobs API.
• Implement durable execution workflows using Temporal for reliable, auditable data orchestration.
• Build resilient services with proper retry logic, circuit breakers, and rate limiting.
• Develop the tracking and state management layer (MySQL) powering observability and SLIs.
• Integrate APIs with Kafka for event-driven data ingestion and delivery.
• Collaborate with Data Engineers to define data contracts and API specifications.
• Contribute to the Developer Portal enabling self-service API access and documentation.

What you need to have:

• Strong experience with Go; TypeScript experience valued for specific platform components.
• Proven track record building production-grade REST or gRPC APIs.
• Solid understanding of Kafka including producers, consumers, partitioning strategies, and at-least-once/exactly-once semantics.
• Experience with relational databases (MySQL or PostgreSQL).
• Understanding of API security, authentication, and rate limiting patterns.
• Experience working in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments (healthcare, fintech, or similar).
• Build and maintain AI-ready data infrastructure, ensuring clean, governed, and accessible data pipelines that power machine learning models and AI-driven products across the platform.
• Expected to leverage AI coding assistants and LLMs to accelerate development, automate documentation, and improve code quality across data pipelines.
• Bonus: Experience with Temporal, Restate, or similar workflow orchestration systems.
• Bonus: Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Bonus: Background in data platforms or data infrastructure teams.

Mindset and Collaboration:

• Service orientation: you build APIs that others love to use.
• Reliability-first: you think about failure modes, retries, and observability from day one.
• Cross-functional: you enjoy working with data engineers and understanding data problems.
• Documentation mindset: you believe good APIs come with great docs.
• Iterative: you ship incrementally and improve based on feedback.

To ensure you feel good solving a big Human problem, we offer:

• A stimulating, fast-paced environment with lots of room for creativity.
• A bright future at a promising high-tech startup company.
• Career development and growth, with a competitive salary.
• The opportunity to work with a talented team and to add real value to an innovative solution with the potential to change the future of healthcare.
• A flexible environment where you can control your hours (remotely) with unlimited vacation.
• Access to our health and well-being program (digital therapist sessions).
• Remote or Hybrid work policy.
• To get to know more about our Tech Stack, check here.

EUR 45,609 - 71,672 a year

Portugal - Sword Benefits & Perks:

• Health, dental and vision insurance

• Meal allowance

• Equity shares

• Remote work allowance

• Flexible working hours

• Work from home

• Discretionary vacation

• Snacks and beverages

• English class

Note: Please note that this position does not offer relocation assistance. Candidates must possess a valid EU visa and be based in Portugal.

Sword Health complies with applicable Federal and State civil rights laws and does not discriminate on the basis of Age, Ancestry, Color, Citizenship, Gender, Gender expression, Gender identity, Gender information, Marital status, Medical condition, National origin, Physical or mental disability, Pregnancy, Race, Religion, Caste, Sexual orientation, and Veteran status.