Software Engineer (Backend)
San Francisco
Engineering /
On-site
About Collate
Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.
Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.
We’re a small, elite team, with over $30M in seed funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, Conviction, and Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join at the ground floor of a company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to design and scale the systems that power Collate’s products. You’ll build the APIs, services, and infrastructure that form the foundation of our platform, ensuring they are performant, reliable, and secure as we grow from prototypes to large-scale deployment.
This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex systems problems, thrives in an early-stage environment, and wants to see their work directly enable breakthroughs in life sciences.
Modern Tech Stack
Collate uses a modern tech stack, targeting a highly reliable and available platform. We use Go for scalable backend services, Postgres as our main database, TypeScript & React for frontend development, and Python for AI & ML services.
Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS with Kubernetes for orchestration and Terraform + Argo CD for configuration management. Other key systems include S3, Kafka, OpenSearch, LLMs, and other AI models.
What You’ll Do
- Design and build backend services, APIs, and data pipelines that support Collate’s products.
- Ensure systems are performant, secure, and reliable at scale.
- Collaborate with product, design, and ML teams to turn ideas into production-ready features.
- Build internal tools and workflows that accelerate engineering productivity.
- Continuously improve backend architecture to support rapid growth and new capabilities.
What We’re Looking For
- Experience designing and scaling backend systems in production.
- Strong skills in building APIs and services, with attention to reliability and performance.
- Comfort working across the stack when needed, with a focus on backend depth.
- Ability to move quickly while building for long-term maintainability.
- Excitement to work in an early-stage startup where ownership is high and impact is immediate.
- A collaborative, humble approach and eagerness to learn whatever is needed to solve the problem
Why Join Collate?
Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.
Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.
Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.
Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career-defining impact.
The base salary range for this role is $150,000–$350,000 USD annually, depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco)
