Senior Backend & Platform Engineer in AI Healthcare Technology

The Opportunity

We are looking for a strong Senior Backend & Platform Engineer to join us at an early stage of this technology initiative.

The successful candidate will initially work closely with our existing technology development partner to understand the current architecture, codebase, databases, cloud environment, AI integrations and deployment processes.

Over time, the person will become one of the key internal technical owners of the platform and will have the opportunity to grow into a Lead Backend Engineer / Platform Lead role as the internal technology organisation expands.

Key Responsibilities

You will:

• Take progressive ownership of the backend and platform architecture.
• Work closely with our current development partner during product development, technical reviews, UAT and handover.
• Understand and take ownership of the existing codebase, APIs, databases, AI integrations and cloud infrastructure.
• Design and develop scalable backend services for an AI-enabled healthcare platform.
• Build and maintain APIs connecting application, AI, search/retrieval, knowledge and data services.
• Work with multi-stage AI workflows involving query processing, information retrieval, context assembly, response generation and validation.
• Build and maintain document-ingestion, processing, indexing, metadata and version-management pipelines.
• Develop secure authentication, role-based access control and enterprise access architecture.
• Design scalable database schemas suitable for future enterprise deployments.
• Improve application reliability, performance, logging, observability and error handling.
• Build automated unit, API and integration tests.
• Participate actively in architecture reviews and code reviews.
• Work closely with AI/ML, frontend, data, product and domain-expert teams.
• Maintain strong technical documentation and engineering standards.
• Support the gradual transition of technology ownership from the external development partner to the internal Centrix team.
• Mentor future engineers and contribute to building the internal engineering organisation.

What We Are Looking For

Essential

• 610 years of software engineering experience.
• Minimum 4+ years of strong hands-on backend development experience in Python.
• Experience with frameworks such as FastAPI, Django, Flask or similar.
• Strong experience designing and building REST APIs.
• Good understanding of backend architecture and distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.
• Experience with Redis or similar caching/message infrastructure.
• Experience with AWS or another major cloud platform.
• Hands-on experience with Docker/containerised applications.
• Good understanding of CI/CD and modern software-development practices.
• Experience working on a production-grade SaaS, AI or data-intensive product.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving ability.
• Ability to understand an existing codebase and progressively take ownership rather than expecting to rebuild everything from scratch.

Strongly Preferred

Experience in one or more of the following would be valuable:

• LLM-based applications
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Semantic search
• Embeddings
• Vector databases such as Qdrant, Pinecone, Weaviate or pgvector
• Document-processing / knowledge-ingestion pipelines
• Elasticsearch / OpenSearch
• Kubernetes
• Event-driven architecture
• Observability and monitoring platforms
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture
• Healthcare, life sciences, scientific-information or knowledge-management platforms

Healthcare experience is preferred but not mandatory. Strong backend and platform-engineering fundamentals are more important.

What This Role Is Not

This is not primarily:

• a prompt-engineering role
• a pure data-science or ML-research position
• an IT-support role
• a maintenance-only backend position
• a project-management role

We are looking for someone who wants to understand, build and progressively own a sophisticated AI-enabled product platform.

What You Will Work On

The platform includes technology areas such as:

• AI-enabled information retrieval: Search, retrieval, contextual information processing and structured AI-generated outputs.
• Knowledge infrastructure: Document ingestion, metadata, version management, citations and information provenance.
• Backend platform: API…