Lead Backend & Platform Engineer

Job Description

Lead Backend & Platform Engineer

🕙 Role details: This is a full time role

💷 Salary: €92,000 - €110,000

🌍 Location: Ireland

The role

We are looking for a Platform Engineering Lead to own the technical implementation and scalability of our cloud infrastructure. As the technical authority for our backend team, you will be responsible for ensuring our Digital Pathway Platform is architected for seamless scalability across international health systems.

This is a pivotal leadership position where you will drive technical excellence, directly impacting the lives of millions of patients by enabling a new asynchronous and remote operating model for healthcare.

What You’ll Do

• Own the platform & infrastructure: Lead the architecture, security, and stability of our GCP platform, ensuring it is built for 100% YoY growth.
• Lead the backend team: Manage and inspire a high-performance team of senior and mid-level backend engineers (3-5 people), fostering a culture of engineering excellence that balances pace with uncompromising quality.
• Drive platform efficiency: Act as the primary steward for technical cost-optimisation and resource management, ensuring the platform scales efficiently as our user base grows.
• Architect complex integrations: Design robust systems to handle deep integrations with external partner APIs, managing diverse authentication mechanisms and resilient data patterns.
• Drive technical strategy: Act as a key partner to the CTO and Director of Engineering (currently also being hired), aligning technical execution with business objectives.
• Embed operational excellence: Refine best-in-class engineering practices - including IaC via Terraform, CI/CD, and security audit readiness - to prevent major production incidents.
• Lead AI workflows: Act as an authority to drive agentic workflows forwards across the team

Why This Role is Unique

We are building a new operating model for healthcare in which care is delivered remotely, asynchronously and increasingly personalised. You will be building the infrastructure for how we deliver this shift. This role offers the rare opportunity to exercise true technical ownership over a mission-critical platform.

You will have the autonomy to set the technical pace, drive architectural decisions, and foster a culture of engineering excellence across the backend organisation. If you are a builder who thrives on high-stakes platform stability and wants to lead a team through 100% YoY growth, this role provides a level of agency and impact rarely found in later-stage environments.

Who We Are

Isla Health is a venture-backed healthtech startup, supporting our partners across the UK, EU and internationally beyond this. We have built a new category of healthcare technology which we refer to as the Digital Pathway Platform (DPP). Founded in 2019, we now support 25% of NHS Trusts and see over 2 million submissions on the platform each year.

As a company we are all laser focused on enabling a scalable model of care which empowers healthcare staff and improves patient outcomes. The DPP supports this by setting up digital pathways which are remote-first and asynchronous. As pathways harness sophisticated automation, clinical algorithms and intelligent cohorting, patients always take the optimised route through their pathway, thereby delivering a step change in clinical productivity.

The Team

You will be joining a lean & high performing engineering organisation. We value pace, but also hold really high quality standards for each other. 

• The structure: You will lead the Backend/Platform team. As the lead, you will report directly to our Director of Engineering.
• Cross-functional collaboration: You’ll work in a tight loop with our Product, Design, and Frontend teams.
• Our tech & tools: 
• We lean into modern, scalable infrastructure (Node.js, TypeScript, GCP). We prioritise tools that enable velocity - such as Terraform and automated CI/CD. 
• We also lean heavily into AI, and you’ll be able (encouraged) to use whatever tools you need to scale your own and the team’s workflows

Requirements

• Proven technical leadership: Experience as a Lead or Senior Engineer, ideally having managed scaling challenges in a high-growth startup.
• GCP & platform mastery: Deep hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Backend expertise: Expert-level understanding of Node.js and TypeScript.
• Integration experience: Comfortable architecting platforms that interact with diverse third-party APIs and robust authentication protocols.
• People management: A passion for mentoring and managing engineers.

Benefits

🕜 Flexible working times

🌍 Work abroad for up to 90 days per year

🏖️ 25 days annual leave (on top of public holidays)

🎂 Take your birthday off 🎄 Take Christmas Eve off too

🧘‍♀️ Generous well-being perks

📚 An annual learning budget to support your growth

🌍 Delivering social impact through improved patient healthcare

💡 Working at a well funded and rapidly growing start up, solving a global problem in a new way

🎇 A whole lot of fun on an exciting journey

Hiring Process

Interviewing with us for the Lead Backend role will be split into 3 stages (all conducted virtually):

1️⃣ A screening interview with one of our Operations Managers - 15 minutes

2️⃣ A technical strategy deep dive: We will run through a scenario to challenge you on your decision making, the speed of your technical understanding, your communication and your out-of-the-box thinking 

3️⃣ Founder interview: To deep dive in to how you operate as a leader to achieve amazing outcomes

Diversity and Inclusion

Isla is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to building an inclusive and diverse team. We encourage all qualified candidates to apply. Isla does not discriminate against anyone on the basis of their race, gender, disability, religion, national origin, age, or any other protected category. We choose to celebrate our team’s differences and see them as one of our most valuable assets.

Recruitment is not one-size-fits-all and we're happy to tailor our hiring process to better meet the needs of individual applicants. Please email [email protected] with any requests for support.