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Staff/Principal Software Engineer

United States
firsthand supports individuals living with SMI (serious mental illness). Our holistic approach includes a team of peer recovery specialists, benefits specialists and clinicians. Our teams focus on meeting each individual where they are and walking with them side by side as a trusted guide and partner on their journey to better health.
 
firsthand's team members use their lived experience to build trust with these individuals and support them in reconnecting to the healthcare they need, while minimizing inappropriate healthcare utilization. Together with our health plan partners, we are changing the way our society supports those most impacted by SMI.
 
We are cultivating a team of deeply passionate problem-solvers to tackle significant and complex healthcare challenges with us. This is more than a job—it's a calling. Every day, you will engage in work that resonates with purpose, gain wisdom from motivated colleagues, and thrive in an environment that celebrates continuous learning, creativity, and fun.
 

In this role you will help improve patient engagement and care quality through developing new features (Typescript, Python and SQL) for our cross functional care teams. As a member of our technology team, you will support our team of peers, social workers, and nurse practitioners to proactively plan appropriate care and focus on critical tasks rather than manual inefficient activities. You will be building impactful healthcare technology on a modern stack.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will:

  • Build scalable and secure systems, prioritizing features and engineering requirements based on user feedback, and constantly evaluating future needs
  • Ensure all tools you develop have minimum necessary access to data
  • Creatively utilize APIs & SDKs to get data to our care teams
  • Ship in small ‘cheap to fail’ increments rather than large multi-sprint projects
  • Be a productive partner with product, data, and operational stakeholders
  • Have a 30 minute 1:1 each week to check in and talk through work

You will be a good fit if you have:

  • Strong empathy for users
  • A pragmatic attitude towards writing software
  • An ability to write software in a way that does not result in tech debt down the road (when possible) - We recognize that there’s a tradeoff between speed and maintainability and prioritize both at different times, to strike a balance
  • A focus on building useful software above all else
  • A desire to flex into some data engineering

The experience you bring to this role includes:

  • A strong ability to dive into an existing codebase and make useful changes
  • 8+ years of experience adding features to web apps, on both the frontend and backend
  • 8+ years experience with Typescript, SQL, and Python
  • A comfort with devops (we use Terraform - the work does not come up often but it sometimes does)

Base salary range:

$150,000 - $160,000 USD

We firmly believe that great candidates for this role may not meet 100% of the criteria listed in this posting. We encourage you to apply anyway - we look forward to begin getting to know you.

Benefits
For full-time employees, our compensation package includes base, equity (or a special incentive program for clinical roles) and performance bonus potential. Our benefits include physical and mental health, dental, vision, 401(k) with a match, 16 weeks parental leave for either parent, 15 days/year vacation in your first year (this increases to 20 days/year in your second year and beyond), and a supportive and inclusive culture.

Vaccination Policy
Employment with firsthand is contingent upon attesting to medical clearance requirements, which include, but may not be limited to: evidence of vaccination for/immunity to COVID-19, Hepatitis B, Influenza, MMR, Chickenpox, Tetanus and Diphtheria. All employees of firsthand are required to receive these vaccinations on a cadence/frequency as advised by the CDC, whereas not otherwise prohibited by state law.
New hires may submit for consideration a request to be exempted from these requirements (based on a valid religious or medical reason) via forms provided by firsthand. Such requests will be subject to review and approval by the Company, and exemptions will be granted only if the Company can provide a reasonable accommodation in relation to the requested exemption. Note that approvals for reasonable accommodations are reviewed and approved on a case-by-case basis and availability of a reasonable accommodation is not guaranteed.
 
Unfortunately, we are not able to offer sponsorship at this time.

 

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