Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer

Chicago, IL (Hybrid) | $170,000–$250,000 + Equity + Visa Sponsorship

Neulinx has partnered with an exceptionally well-funded AI startup that's already making waves in healthcare.

Following an outstanding launch, the business has secured significant contracted ARR within weeks, built a strong enterprise pipeline and is scaling rapidly. With a lean engineering team, they're now looking for an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to become one of the earliest technical hires and take ownership of the platform as they enter their next phase of growth.

This is an opportunity to shape the technical foundations of a company solving real-world

problems with AI while working directly alongside the founders.

The Opportunity

You'll own the systems that keep the product running.

From infrastructure and deployment to security, observability and reliability, you'll ensure the platform scales quickly, securely and efficiently as customer adoption accelerates.

You'll also play a key role in mentoring engineers, influencing technical direction and helping build the engineering function as the business grows.

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience owning production backend systems within a startup or high-growth environment.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals across cloud infrastructure, Linux, containers, networking and databases.
• Experience designing secure, scalable and resilient systems that support real-world production workloads.
• Hands-on knowledge of deployments, monitoring, incident response and operational best practices.
• Comfortable troubleshooting across infrastructure, application code and databases.
• A builder's mindset with the ability to work independently and take ownership from day one.

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• Experience using AI engineering tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex as part of your daily workflow.
• Previous experience working for a US technology company.

Desirable Experience

• Healthcare, HealthTech or other regulated environments.
• Scaling products through rapid growth at an early-stage startup.
• Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and observability tooling.
• Founding Engineer or early engineering team experience.
• Open-source contributions, technical writing or notable side projects.

What's on Offer

• Join one of the earliest employees in a rapidly growing AI startup.
• Own the backend platform and infrastructure from the outset.
• Work directly with ambitious founders on a genuinely meaningful product.
• Shape engineering standards, architecture and future hiring.
• Meaningful equity package.
• Visa sponsorship available.
• Hybrid working in Chicago, with flexibility for exceptional candidates.

If you're looking for genuine ownership, technical autonomy and the opportunity to build the engineering foundations of an ambitious AI startup, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply today or contact Neulinx for a confidential discussion.