Founding Infra Engineer

Job description

ABOUT JOYFUL HEALTH Building the financial operating system for healthcare, and bringing the joy back to healthcare by fixing the financial chaos behind it. The healthcare payment system is a complex and inefficient maze - healthcare practices leave $125 billion in revenue uncollected each year, lost in the chaos of fragmented financial data, manual workflows, and opaque payer systems. This financial uncertainty leaves practices struggling to stay afloat, while valuable revenue slips through the cracks. Joyful Health is building the AI-powered financial operating system for healthcare practices. Our mission is to bring the joy back to running a private practice by simplifying financial operations so providers can focus on patient care. We spent 10 months working as fractional CFOs for a dozen practices, doing this work side by side with providers as we developed our product. We just announced our $22M Series A led by CRV and world-class investors including the founders of MongoDB & KAYAK. 🚀 We have an enormous opportunity in front of us. The broken healthcare payment ecosystem impacts practices of all sizes, and the opportunity to make a real difference is massive. This role is full-time. We’re looking for someone NYC-based who is open to coming into the office 3 days a week. The base pay range for this role is $150,000–$275,000 per year. ROLE DESCRIPTION We’re hiring a founding Infra engineer with deep experience across Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and production-grade reliability. You’ll own the foundation that powers everything we build—our deployment architecture, service mesh, observability stack, and core platform reliability. Our platform ingests, reconciles, and analyzes large volumes of messy financial data from every type of healthcare system imaginable. Keeping that pipeline stable, secure, and scalable is mission-critical. In a landscape where every customer’s environment is different, highly repeatable infrastructure and robust automation are differentiators. You’ll design, build, and operate the core infrastructure that allows us to ship fast, stay reliable, and onboard customers seamlessly. As one of the earliest engineers on the team, you’ll shape our architecture, engineering practices, and culture from day one. This is a full-time role, based in NYC. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Accelerate the entire engineering team by building novel tooling, automation, and proven infra best practices that dramatically increase development velocity - Design and maintain high-leverage CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions) that make shipping safe, fast, and frustration-free - Own our Kubernetes-based platform end-to-end: architecture, deployment strategy, scaling, and overall reliability - Build a stable, automated infrastructure layer around our Python services, ingestion pipelines, and compute workloads - Implement robust observability (metrics, logs, tracing) and build a clean operational picture of system health - Establish strong security foundations: secrets management, IAM hardening, system-level policies, and compliance-friendly patterns - Improve and optimize PostgreSQL performance, monitoring, and operational stability across workloads - Drive the team’s infrastructure roadmap and ensure our architecture supports rapid onboarding and growth - Build internal tooling that reduces complexity, eliminates manual ops, and gives engineers “superpowers” - Collaborate closely with engineering and product to ensure that infra choices enable—not constrain—our product velocity WE’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU IF… - You’re energized by Joyful Health’s mission—building tools that help providers take control of their financial health - You want to shape foundational architecture at an early-stage startup and influence technical decisions for years - You thrive in ambiguous environments and take pride in owning problems end-to-end - You value craftsmanship, reliability, and clean abstractions—infra that feels elegant, not duct-taped - You have 5+ years of experience in Infra//SRE/platform engineering roles - You have strong experience with: - Kubernetes (EKS or GKE preferred) - Python engineering workflows - CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar) - PostgreSQL performance, operations, and tuning - Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred) - Cloud networking, security, and IAM best practices WORKING AT JOYFUL At Joyful Health, we’re on a mission to fix one of the most broken systems in healthcare. Learn more about our culture and how we do work at Joyful here https://joyful-health.notion.site/Public-How-We-Work-Guide-2c30f4731c828043baebd76d6d3657bb?source=copy_link! Joining us means having the opportunity to make a direct, meaningful impact on the lives of clinicians and the financial health of their practices. Here’s what you can expect from working with us: 🚀 Meaningful Impact You’ll be tackling one of the most complex challenges in healthcare—helping practices thrive in a chaotic financial landscape. Your work will directly contribute to solving one of the most hair on fire problems for providers, ensuring that they can focus on what they do best: caring for patients. 🔑 Autonomy & Ownership As an early team member, you’ll have significant autonomy and the chance to shape our company from the ground up. You’ll have ownership over your work and the freedom to challenge the status quo in an environment that values initiative and creativity. 📈 Growth & Learning We’re a small, ambitious team with big goals, which means you’ll be constantly learning and growing. You’ll take on new challenges, expand your skill set, and have direct access to experienced founders and advisors who are invested in your development. We also offer stipends for professional development courses & books (that we often will partake in together!) so we can all continuously grow. 💰 Competitive Compensation & Equity We believe that our team is our most valuable asset. We offer competitive compensation packages, strong equity, and the opportunity to share in the success of Joyful Health. We want you to feel supported, both financially and professionally, as we grow together. ❤️ Be Your Best Self We provide the benefits you need to stay happy and healthy, including comprehensive healthcare benefits, unlimited PTO (with a minimum of 10 days off a year), and flexibility so you can take care of yourself. We also organize regular team off-sites and events to ensure that even as we tackle big problems we enjoy the journey. If you’re passionate about empowering practices and excited to tackle one of the most important (& challenging!) problems in healthcare, we’d love to meet you. Please apply even if you don't meet 100% of the criteria. Nobody checks every box every time and we'd love to talk to you about how and why you can see yourself growing into this role. We're also very open to candidates with non-traditional experience.