Senior backend engineer

About Belay

Belay helps skilled nursing operators keep the people who keep their buildings running.

We started Belay because good people keep leaving care jobs for reasons that could have been heard sooner. The information to help was already there, spread across systems nobody had time to read together.

Payroll, HR and surveys each hold part of the story. Belay reads them together, so leaders can see who needs support, and why.

About the role

Everything a leader sees in Belay starts as a record in someone else’s system. You’ll own the path it takes: the connectors that bring it in, the pipeline that cleans and joins it, the measures built from it and the APIs our web app reads.

The records are about people, so correctness and privacy come before speed.

What you’ll do

• Build and run connectors to the systems operators already use: Paycor’s API and Align survey exports today, secure file transfers and scheduling systems next.
• Make every pull dependable: pick up where an interrupted pull stopped, backfill history, load the same data twice without duplicating it, and know quickly when a source changes or a pull fails.
• Turn raw records into measures leaders can trust, like turnover, new-hire retention and overtime, each with its definition, time window and lineage.
• Design typed APIs in FastAPI. Our Next.js web app generates its TypeScript types from them.
• Keep each customer’s data private and separate, with Postgres row-level security, field-level encryption with a separate key for each customer, and least-privilege access for every service.
• Run it on Google Cloud: Cloud Run services and jobs, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, Cloud Storage, Cloud KMS and Cloud Scheduler, defined in Terraform and deployed through Cloud Build.
• Work with customers’ IT teams when we connect a new system.

What you’ll bring

• Several years building and running backend services in production, mostly in Python, including async code, SQLAlchemy and Pydantic.
• Deep PostgreSQL experience: schema design, migrations, query plans, and keeping many customers’ data apart in one database.
• Experience pulling data from systems you don’t control: pagination, rate limits, retries, changing schemas and backfills.
• Production experience on a major cloud, ideally Google Cloud, with infrastructure as code. We use Terraform.
• Good instincts with sensitive data: encryption and key management, least privilege, and keeping personal information out of logs.
• A testing habit. You reproduce a bug before you fix it, and you write the test that would have caught it.
• Clear writing. You can explain a design choice and its tradeoffs in a few plain paragraphs.
• Care for the people at the other end of the data: the CNAs, nurses and leaders who keep skilled nursing buildings running.

Nice to have

• Experience with payroll, HR, scheduling or timekeeping data.
• Experience building software under HIPAA, or elsewhere in healthcare.
• TypeScript, React and Next.js, which our web app is built with.
• Envelope encryption, key rotation or searching encrypted fields, in production.
• Defining metrics people make decisions with, like retention by hire cohort.
• Single sign-on and directory sync. We use WorkOS.

How we work

• People make every decision. Belay never decides who stays or who goes.
• Belay is for support. It’s never used for discipline or hiring decisions.
• We’d rather build it well than build it twice.
• We fix what happens often, and don’t gold-plate the rare case.
• Every change gets an independent review before it merges, and every production release needs an explicit approval.
• Development and test data is always synthetic, never real personal information.

How to apply

Email careers@belay.health with your resume or LinkedIn profile and a few lines about why this work interests you. If there’s a fit, the next step is a conversation with one of the founders.