Staff Product Engineer -API Platform
Most people don't think twice about going to the doctor. But for over 85 million uninsured and underinsured Americans — the cashiers, drivers, home health aides, and construction workers who keep this country running — getting care is complicated, expensive, and often out of reach.
We built Vitable to change that.
Vitable is the health benefits platform designed for every worker. We make it easy for employers to offer real, high-quality healthcare to their teams — not watered-down coverage, but benefits that actually work. It's better for employees. It's smarter for employers. And it matters.
We're a small, passionate team moving fast and solving a problem that genuinely deserves solving. If you're looking for a place where your work has a tangible impact on real people's lives, you've found it.
Where You Come In
We are seeking a Staff Product Engineer who combines strong backend engineering expertise, product judgment, API platform experience, and technical leadership.
In this role, you will lead the development and evolution of Vitable’s Benefits Partner API Platform. This platform enables employers, brokers, benefits administrators, payroll providers, and other strategic partners to integrate directly with Vitable’s benefits infrastructure. It powers critical workflows such as eligibility, enrollment, employee and dependent management, benefit access, billing-adjacent data flows, reporting, and partner-facing operational automation.
You will be responsible for building a platform that is reliable, secure, intuitive, well-documented, and easy for partners to adopt. This includes thoughtful API design, authentication and authorization patterns, sandbox environments, developer documentation, observability, versioning strategies, and internal tooling that helps Vitable scale partner integrations without scaling operational complexity.
You will work closely with engineering, product, operations, customer success, sales, implementation, and business stakeholders to solve ambiguous, mission-critical problems. You’ll be expected to deeply understand our partners, customers, members, and internal teams; make thoughtful technical tradeoffs; and lead projects from problem definition through production launch and ongoing operation.
This is primarily a backend role, but we are looking for someone comfortable working across the stack when needed to deliver complete product outcomes.
Your Day to Da
Own the Partner API Platform: Design, build, and operate the backend systems, APIs, integrations, and platform capabilities that enable partners to connect with Vitable’s benefits infrastructure.
Lead ambiguous projects end-to-end: Take large, complex problems from discovery and technical design through implementation, release, monitoring, documentation, and iteration.
Set the standard for API design: Create simple, consistent, secure, and scalable APIs with strong conventions around authentication, authorization, pagination, filtering, error handling, idempotency, versioning, and backward compatibility.
Build a world-class developer experience: Develop and maintain partner-facing API documentation, sandbox environments, API key management, integration guides, testing tools, and examples that make integrations easy to understand and adopt.
Drive product and business impact: Partner with product, operations, implementation, customer success, sales, and business teams to understand partner needs, business goals, operational workflows, and integration constraints.
Shape technical direction: Make architectural decisions that balance speed, reliability, security, compliance, maintainability, developer experience, and customer impact.
Build reliable integration infrastructure: Develop systems with strong guarantees around correctness, idempotency, auditability, observability, access control, and failure recovery.
Scale partner operations: Build internal tools and automation that reduce manual implementation effort, improve partner onboarding, and make integrations easier to monitor, debug, and support.
Contribute across the stack: While the role is backend-focused, contribute to frontend and internal tooling experiences when needed to deliver complete product outcomes.
Raise the engineering bar: Write clean, maintainable code; participate in thoughtful code reviews; mentor other engineers; and champion engineering best practices.
Operate with urgency and ownership: Move quickly while maintaining high standards for quality, security, reliability, and long-term platform health.
Required Qualifications
5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Experience designing, building, maintaining, and operating production APIs or integration platforms used by external customers, partners, or third-party developers.
Experience building production systems where reliability, correctness, security, observability, and maintainability are critical.
Proven ability to independently lead complex projects with measurable business, customer, partner, or operational impact.
Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and ownership mindset.
Experience working cross-functionally with product, operations, customer success, implementation, sales, compliance, or business stakeholders.
Strong product judgment and ability to translate ambiguous partner or business needs into pragmatic technical solutions.
Startup or high-growth company experience is a plus.
Experience in healthcare, benefits administration, insurance, HR tech, payroll, fintech, or another regulated/integration-heavy domain is a plus.
Required Technical Skills:
Strong proficiency in Python.
Strong understanding of backend system design, software architecture, APIs, data modeling, and distributed systems fundamentals.
Strong knowledge of API platform best practices, including API key management, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, versioning, idempotency, pagination, error design, sandbox environments, and developer documentation.
Experience designing and maintaining REST APIs or other external-facing integration surfaces.
Experience building resilient systems with robust monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, and incident response practices.
Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.
Comfortable using AI coding tools and agents to accelerate development while maintaining strong technical judgment and ownership of decisions.
Highly Preferred:
Experience with Django and Django REST Framework.
Experience building partner platforms, developer platforms, API gateways, integration infrastructure, or public/private external APIs.
Experience with healthcare, benefits, eligibility, enrollment, payroll, HRIS, insurance, or employer benefits data models.
Experience designing secure systems that handle sensitive data, including PII or healthcare-related data.
Experience with compliance-aware engineering in healthcare, benefits, insurance, payroll, fintech, or other regulated industries.
Experience with webhooks, event-driven architectures, asynchronous jobs, partner sync workflows, file-based integrations, or third-party integration monitoring.
Experience with component-based frontend frameworks such as React or Vue.
Ability to collaborate with designers and internal stakeholders to build polished, user-friendly internal tools or partner-facing experiences when needed.
What You're Made Of
Clear, direct communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Strong collaboration skills and comfort working across engineering, product, operations, customer success, implementation, sales, and business teams.
High adaptability in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
Strong product sense and ability to connect technical decisions to user, partner, operational, and business outcomes.
Bias toward action, balanced with good judgment around security, reliability, partner experience, and long-term maintainability.
Ability to mentor engineers, influence technical direction, and raise the quality bar without requiring formal authority.
How We Take Care of You
We believe in taking care of the people who take care of our members. Here's what that looks like:
100% Silver Plan medical coverage — plus dental and vision
Vitable Primary Care membership — the same care we give our members, yours too
401(k) and life insurance
Unlimited PTO — and we actually mean it
Remote-first — work from wherever you do your best thinking
MacBook and home office setup stipend — the gear you need to do great work
Competitive equity — you're building something real, you should own a piece of it
Are You Our Kind of Person?
We don't have a big corporate machine behind us. What we have is a clear mission, a lot of heart, and a deep sense of urgency about the problem we're solving. That means we move fast, figure things out, and hold ourselves to a high bar — not because someone's watching, but because we care.
You'll thrive here if you're the kind of person who:
Feels personally connected to making healthcare more accessible
Gets energized by building, not just maintaining
Can navigate ambiguity without losing momentum
Does the unglamorous work when it needs doing — and does it well
Asks for help when you need it and offers it when you see someone else does
Cares about the details, but keeps sight of the bigger picture
We're a team that shows up for each other. We celebrate wins together, work through hard problems together, and genuinely like each other. If something feels off, we say so. If someone's struggling, we notice.
No egos. No jerks. Just good humans doing meaningful work — and having fun doing it.
One Last Note on Who We Hire
The people we serve are diverse — and our team should be too. We're committed to building a workplace where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives aren't just welcomed, they're essential to the work.
Vitable is an equal opportunity employer. We don't hire to check boxes. We hire people who care about what we're building and bring something real to the table.
If this role excites you but you don't meet every requirement on the list, please apply anyway. We mean that.