Product Engineer, Platform

Pelago is the leading specialty substance use care provider, built on the belief that effective treatment means matching care intensity to what each member actually needs rather than defaulting to the most expensive intervention. Our programs guide members through every stage of the substance use spectrum, from unhealthy habits to active use disorders, delivering personalized treatment for tobacco, alcohol, opioid, cannabis, and stimulant use based on individual health, habits, genetics, and goals.

With Sona, our voice-first AI Mental Health Specialist, Pelago now applies that same clinically-driven model to mental health, pairing deep clinical expertise with technology to expand access without compromising care quality. We believe technology should make clinical care more precise and more human, not replace the judgment behind it.

Pelago has scaled to helping hundreds of employers and health plans and has already helped more than 750,000 members better manage their substance use. If you're passionate about AI and making an impact on the health of others, join us and make it happen!

Overview of the Role:

This is a Platform Engineering role with a Product Engineer's mindset. You'll own the foundation that Pelago's product and data run on. That means the infrastructure, the event-driven data platform, and the reliability and cost discipline that keep both healthy. You'll build with the end use in mind: reporting, member-facing features, and ultimately, clinical impact.

Pelago is building behavioral health care delivery from the ground up. It's AI-native and outcome-oriented, and what we ship has direct consequences for member health. Engineers here own meaningful problems end-to-end, from discovery through production and iteration.

We're looking for an engineer who builds reliable, event-driven systems on AWS and defines them as code. You should care how the platform is used, and you should be grounded enough to make sound trade-offs where member safety, privacy and reliability matter as much as speed. You'll join the Platform Product Engineering team; a current team of three.

This is a hybrid role with a high-collaboration rhythm (3 days/week in our NYC office).

About Pelago Engineering:

Our engineering team operates as empowered, outcome-oriented problem solvers, working in close partnership with product, design, and clinical teams to improve member outcomes at scale.

As AI transforms how software is built, we are intentionally evolving our development lifecycle so we spend less time on mechanical implementation and more time on system design, judgment, and impact.

How We Work:

Outcome-driven: Engineers are given problems to solve, not just features to build. Success is measured by learning, impact, and outcomes—not velocity alone

AI-native: We use AI across the SDLC to accelerate implementation, testing, and review. Engineers focus on defining intent, validating behavior, and designing resilient systems

High autonomy, high accountability: Teams have real ownership over their domains. With autonomy comes responsibility for quality, safety, and results

Cross-functional by default: Engineers partner deeply with Product, Design, Data, and Clinical. Discovery, experimentation, and delivery are shared responsibilities

Quality and safety matter: We build in a regulated, member-impacting domain. Reliability, observability, and correctness are first-class concerns

In This Role You Will:

Own Pelago's event-driven data platform end-to-end. Build and evolve pipelines that bring data from our product, third-party platforms and external partners into our warehouse, reliably and securely.

Define and manage Infrastructure As Code and CI/CD, so environments are reproducible, changes ship safely, and any engineer can deploy with confidence.

Build a single, consistent pattern for adding new data sources and services, so engineers don't have to reinvent the pipeline.

Design with the final mile in mind. Deliver data and platform capabilities that support analytics and reporting and that can power member-facing product features.

Own observability and alerting. Build monitoring that catches missing, late or incorrect data, and failing services, before the people relying on them do. Keep the lights on through on-call and incident response.

Practice frugal architecture. Make cost a design constraint, and continuously optimize AWS hosting and data costs without compromising reliability.

Build platform capabilities that support agentic workflows, enabling full-circle support from detection to diagnosis to resolution.

Partner with analytics, product, clinical and commercial teams to understand what matters and why. Define clear ownership boundaries with analytics and product engineering, so everyone knows where the platform ends and modeling, reporting and feature work begin.

Improve Pelago's engineering system: AI-native development practices, testing, documentation, knowledge sharing and review quality.

The Background We're Looking For:

Strong production experience as a backend, platform or systems engineer in a startup or scale-up environment. We welcome systems engineers who have built and run production cloud infrastructure and want to move closer to product and data.

Hands-on experience with Terraform and Infrastructure As Code, and with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.

Strong AWS experience, including designing, securing and operating cloud-native services.

Proficiency in Python and TypeScript (Node) across backend services, data pipelines and tooling.

Deep experience with event-driven architectures and data platforms (e.g., Kafka or AWS-native streaming and messaging), including integrating third-party data sources in production.

Strong instincts for observability and reliability: you know how to tell when systems or data are wrong, late or incomplete, and you build alerting and runbooks that surface it.

A cost-conscious mindset. You've optimized hosting costs and made architecture trade-offs with spend in mind.

Familiarity with agentic workflows and how to build systems that support them.

Strong relational database design and SQL skills.

Strong product sense: you can start from the user or business problem and understand how the platform will be used downstream.

Comfort operating autonomously in ambiguous environments and making sound trade-offs with incomplete information.

Fluency with AI-augmented engineering workflows while maintaining human judgment and QA discipline.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

Experience with dbt and data modeling, and with how analytics teams model and consume data.

Experience in healthcare, digital health, or safety-sensitive regulated software, including handling sensitive health data.

Experience integrating healthcare data sources (e.g., health information exchanges) or marketing and engagement platforms.

At this time, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this position.

Please note that Pelago is dedicated to providing accommodations to candidates upon request. If you need accommodations at any point throughout the interview process, please reach out to your recruiter.

Before you apply, see how we build.

We write about our technical decisions, product philosophy, and the real challenges of scaling behavioral health. Read the blog → https://pelagohealth.ai/

The provided range reflects our US target salary range for this full-time position, which is part of our broader total compensation package, including incentive bonus program, stock options, comprehensive benefits, and incentive pay applicable to eligible roles. Individual pay within the range will vary based on a variety of factors like role-related experience and education, internal pay equity, and other relevant business factors. At Pelago, we are committed to an equitable and fair pay philosophy and review total compensation for our employees at least twice a year.

Base Pay Range$190,000—$200,000 USD