---
title: 'Staff Back-End Engineer: Search APIs at Helm Health'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-back-end-engineer-search-apis-helm-health-united-states-8faygvtjn2mb'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Staff Back-End Engineer: Search APIs at Helm Health

- **Company:** Helm Health
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-07-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/helm-health/am9icG9zdDpyyaiN6BfrrMwyALS9AcWx

## Job description

## About Helm Health

Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that lets members see simple, upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care.

Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join!

## Role Overview & Team Context

Helm's Search and Dynamic Copay APIs are the critical interfaces our customers build on: a member describes a symptom or searches for a specialist, and our search and ranking engine surfaces the right providers and their copays for that service. These are public, versioned gRPC APIs shipped with client SDKs in Go, Python, and TypeScript, and they sit directly in the critical path of every plan sponsor and partner application built on Helm.

We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to serve as the technical lead for our public API surface area. You'll own the architecture of provider search, ranking, and copay lookup, and you'll help set the bar for how we design, version, and scale APIs and SDKs that external engineering teams depend on. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you'll be writing and reviewing code and designs, while also setting technical direction, driving execution, mentoring engineers, and scaling the team.

Responsibilies

- Drive technical direction, implementation, and production support for the client-facing gRPC APIs and SDKs powering provider search, ranking, and dynamic copay lookups.
- Drive public API design decisions that hold up over years, not just sprints: versioning, backward compatibility, field masks, CEL-based filtering, error semantics, and gRPC status code conventions that external developers can build reliable integrations against.
- Design and evolve the ranking and steerage logic that decides which providers and specialties surface first, balancing relevance, network status, cost, client overrides, and plan-specific incentives.
- Design for scale and reliability under real production load: geofenced queries, rate limiting, retry and timeout budgets, and graceful degradation when upstream dependencies are slow or unavailable.
- Partner with product and partner engineering teams to shape the external SDK and developer experience, projects, and roadmap.

## What You'll Bring

- 8+ years building backend services and distributed systems.
- Deep experience with search systems and architecture at scale - you've built or evolved a production search or ranking system, and understand the tradeoffs between recall, precision, and latency at high query volume.
- Experience across multiple search architectures & paradigms — keyword/lexical search, vector/embedding-based retrieval, and LLM-driven query understanding or reranking — and a point of view on when to reach for each.
- A track record shipping public APIs and SDKs: versioning, backward compatibility, and multi-language client libraries external developers can rely on.
- Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical lead: setting architectural direction, writing clear design docs, and raising the bar for engineers around you, while influencing without authority.
- Experience running GCP data infrastructure at scale — AlloyDB/Postgres, BigQuery, Bigtable — and good instincts for matching store to access pattern.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Prior experience with provider search, clinical/specialty matching, network steerage, or benefits/copay logic in a healthcare or insurance context.
- Familiarity with geospatial query patterns (geofencing, distance-based ranking) at scale.
- Experience building retrieval evaluation frameworks — knowing how actually to measure whether search results are "good."
- Experience in Go, with real gRPC and protobuf experience in production.
- Terraform/Terraform Cloud
- Start-up experience

Characteristics

- Ownership that shows up before you're asked — you protect the systems you own and see problems through.
- Mission-driven — motivated by making healthcare simpler and more transparent
- Curiosity that digs past the first plausible explanation, and the self-motivation to raise the next hard problem before it's urgent.
- Comfortable working in a fast-moving team where requirements evolve quickly

Internal Tools/Technology

- Cursor / Linear / GitHub / Notion / Whimsical
- Slack / Google Workspace / Zoom
- Incident.io / Sentry
- Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — we are an AI-forward engineering team
- macOS / Linux

## Compensation

The target base salary range for this position is $150,000 - $225,000 and is part of a competitive total rewards package including equity and benefits. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors, including experience, skills, location, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations.

## Benefits/Offerings

- Bonus + equity
- Unlimited PTO (mandatory 12 days)
- Computer + home office stipend
- 401(k) + matching
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Autonomy and tons of room for career growth

Occasional Travel We meet quarterly as a company.

Please note that this is a fully remote opportunity.

## About Helm Health

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Helm Health powers a new wave of health plans by providing a Dynamic Copay platform that brings simple, upfront prices to members and eliminates deductibles.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Columbus, Ohio, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Brodie Stone, Ross Klosterman

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Healthtech / Insurance technology (Embedded Software Products)
- **Target customers**: B2B – TPAs (Third-Party Administrators) and carriers who build Dynamic Copay products for their members
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Take the confusion out of health insurance by making every service easily shoppable, upfront. Guaranteed.”

## Products & Services
- **[Dynamic Copay]**: A system that adjusts member cost share based on the value of healthcare services, aiming to provide higher benefit coverage and lower total cost of care. (SaaS platform)
- **[Copay Algorithm]**: Dynamically scores healthcare providers and assigns copay levels to them. (Algorithm/API)
- **[Copay Repricer]**: Bundles claims to match the price quoted upfront to the member. (Service/API)
- **[Shopping Tool]**: An intuitive search experience for healthcare services, used by members and navigators. (Application)
- **[Provider Finder Tool]**: Helps users find healthcare providers with regularly updated information from partners. (Informational tool)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (Seed round, amount not publicly available)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – Seed round from 1 investor (undisclosed amount)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Investor not named; partners include TPAs and carriers (specific names not public)
- **Growth Signals**: Employee headcount grew 61.5% year-over-year (from ~10 to 17-19 employees); remote-first hiring across engineering, product, and executive roles; 75% of care is shopped through the platform, delivering 15% plan savings.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Dynamic Copay model** that uses upfront prices to drive member engagement and decision making, reducing plan costs.
- **Smart claim bundling** preserves provider fee-for-service reimbursement while creating simple, guaranteed prices for members.
- **Value-based coverage** based on provider cost and quality, eliminating deductibles and reducing complexity.
- **Early mover** in a niche combining health insurance transparency with algorithmic pricing.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the engineering team** to build out core backend infrastructure, data pipelines, and public-facing APIs.
- **Expand product capabilities** in claims monitoring, self-service configuration, and reporting.
- **Deepen partner integrations** with TPAs and carriers to drive adoption of Dynamic Copay products.
- **Maintain HIPAA compliance** and data governance as the platform grows.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-first culture** – all current open positions are remote within the United States.
- **Early-stage impact** – join a small, growing team (17-19 employees) where engineers own significant parts of the architecture.
- **Mission-driven** – work on making healthcare pricing transparent and affordable.
- **Modern tech stack** – TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery, gRPC, and cloud infrastructure (CI/CD, DevOps).
- **Growth opportunities** – roles span senior to staff levels; company has grown headcount >60% YoY and shows strong product-market fit.
- **Notable perks** – not explicitly listed, but typical of early-stage healthtech startups: equity, flexible remote work, direct influence on product direction.

## Sources
1. [helmhealth.com](https://www.helmhealth.com/)
2. [crunchbase.com](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/helm-health)
3. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/helm-health/jobs)
4. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/pay-with-helm)
5. [gem.com](https://jobs.gem.com/helm-health)

## Other roles at Helm Health

- [Senior Back-End Engineer: Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-back-end-engineer-infrastructure-helm-health-united-states-tkdnppnej5jc) — United States
- [Staff Product Manager: Admin Dashboard & Configuration Engine](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-product-manager-admin-dashboard-configuration-engine-helm-health-united-tpt3pnav91bz) — United States
- [Staff Back-End Engineer: Claims Engine](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-back-end-engineer-claims-engine-helm-health-united-states-m6wtswc4zf2q) — United States
- [Chief of Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-helm-health-united-states-azn9zmvttx9b) — United States
- [Staff Back-End Engineer: Data](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-back-end-engineer-data-helm-health-united-states-zmzzpt2tfqsr) — United States
- [Senior Back-End Engineer: Dynamic Copay Engine](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-back-end-engineer-dynamic-copay-engine-helm-health-united-states-c91q02392xh7) — United States
- [Senior Full-Stack Engineer I: Self-Service Configuration & Plan Design](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-full-stack-engineer-i-self-service-configuration-plan-design-helm-health-1pgam20yq0m0) — United States
- [Senior Full-Stack Engineer I: Claims Monitoring & Management](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-full-stack-engineer-i-claims-monitoring-management-helm-health-united-drz813dwn6hd) — United States
- [Senior Full-Stack Engineer I: Self-Service Reporting](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-full-stack-engineer-i-self-service-reporting-helm-health-united-states-gsv5gqc0bfsn) — United States