Backend Engineer

Primarily New York, NY & Silicon Valley • Fulltime

About Health Rhythms

Mental health has been neglected the world over, yet it is central to everything we do. We want to change that. Our mission is to redefine not only how we measure and treat mental illness, but how we optimize well-being as a whole. We are making it easy to measure and care for everyone’s mental health.

Pioneered by a team of highly successful startup founders and leaders in tech, business, and medicine – including Harvard and Stanford trained proven entrepreneurs, University of Pittsburgh and University of Pennsylvania physicians, MIT Media Lab and Cornell-trained technologists – HealthRhythms hopes to redefine how behavioral health
is understood and managed in the 21st century.

We use signals from mobile phones and other devices to understand behavioral health and treat mental health conditions. Some of our important work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health.

If joining an accelerating startup that is trying to significantly improve people’s lives sounds meaningful and exciting to you, please read on and apply.

HealthRhythms is a Social Impact Organization

How is our solution not just incremental – but actually transformational? Does our solution solve an ecosystem level problem, that in so doing, improves lives at scale?

In contrast to all other areas of medicine, up until now mental health has been largely reliant on subjective patient self-report and, perhaps, even more subjective clinician judgments that are based on very brief and intermittent interviews and observations of patient behavior. This contributes to diagnostic errors that, in turn, lead to reduced quality of care and poorer treatment outcomes that then lead to high dropout rates, and unnecessary ER visits, hospitalizations, and deaths.

HealthRhythms is on a mission to become the world leader in objectively measuring mental health. We do this by capturing critical behavioral information — from sleep/wake rhythms, and physical activity, to social engagement (patterns of out-of-home activity, patterns of technology use and screen time, etc.) — to provide a more complete picture of individuals’ behavioral health with clinically actionable insight.

Mental health clinicians, health systems and payers need objective, continuously collected and easily interpretable patient data to fully appreciate patient status and enable quick, flexible, and targeted interventions that lead to positive outcomes and reduced treatment costs. Patients, and their families, need information that can help them to manage their own illness in a more effective manner.

It is time to re-imagine what the next generation of mental health care as universal health care can look like.

• This is a universal human problem – not local, not cultural, not tribal, this extends across all of humanity; there are different cultural expressions and it hits different cultures differently but we can bring a universal understanding to this
• If we can make the nature of this empirical and not invisible suffering then it is validating and we can remove the stigma associated with mental illness
• Imagine if your personal devices could really know you, know you in the sense of tracking a rich set of behaviors to continuously, accurately assess your mental health
• Imagine that machine learning translates that intimate knowledge of your daily behaviors into precise suggestions for behavior change that lead to improvement in symptoms of depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. This is the promise of digital phenotyping.
• Just as digital biomarkers can transform human access to mental health self-care, digital biomarkers can transform clinical support of more acute populations where there is a great unmet need.
• Our solutions ensure equity of access: they are accessible to anyone who owns a smartphone and has a connectivity contract or access WiFi. Our digital intervention platforms are accessible wherever there is cellular signal or WiFi available, bringing validated intervention to those who for either financial or geographic reasons do not have access to care.

What do we value?

• Mental health as foundational to overall health
• Protecting patient privacy at all costs. We actively develop privacy protective algorithms to ensure that only clinically relevant information is recorded
• Creating person-specific interventions driven by Machine Learning that dynamically adapt and scale, yet remain personal
• Deploying empirically-validated approaches to measuring and improving mental health
• Empathically supporting people in becoming more active, socially engaged, and above all more mentally healthy
• Passion in people to transform how mental health is considered in society

What will you be working on?

As an early employee you will contribute to multiple facets of high volume data processing and validation. This is an opportunity to create a new industry from the ground up – playing an instrumental role in the advancement of our core infrastructure – and to have an impact on the future of digital health therapeutics. Our system collects sensor data from mobile phones and turns this data into actionable behavioral profiles of users.

Our backend data pipeline is an event-driven system that is built in Python and hosted on AWS. We’re at the tipping point as a company where we need to focus on improving ease and efficiency in our system so that we can more easily scale the number of end users and organizations that we can support. At the same time we need to place additional focus on maintaining data quality as we scale and improving our testing and monitoring frameworks.

You’ll have a wide range of tasks to work on. We’re actively improving our internal and external REST APIs, our ETL pipeline, and aiding the build out of our infrastructure around machine learning models in conjunction with the data science team. We’re actively improving our intervention platform with plans to add more intelligence around personalization. We’re just starting to build out our regression testing capabilities and improve our data quality monitoring to go from tracking hundreds of users to thousands and tens of thousands. There’s no shortage of work to be done and we need a good self-starter who can hit the ground running to help us achieve our goals.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of on the job experience with Python
• Experience building and maintaining data pipelines in Python
• Experience with AWS machine learning / data science tools, notably Sagemaker (training, tuning and deploying models using common algorithms and frameworks e.g., TensorFlow)
• Architecting and deploying applications to Amazon Web Services (we currently use S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, Cognito, API Gateway, Athena, ECS, and more)
• Automation tools (CloudFormation, Ansible, or similar), Monitoring tools (CloudWatch, NewRelic, DataDog, or similar) and DevOps best practices

Desired

• Experience developing backend systems in healthcare (or other highly regulated environments)
• Experience with GDPR or other regional data compliance frameworks
• Experience with ISO standards of security (e.g., 27001)
• A history of collaborating with data scientists to build models into existing data infrastructure
• Experience or interest in data analytics, machine learning frameworks, data visualization
• Experience scaling cloud systems

Who we are searching for?

We’re looking for someone who will make our team, our product and ultimately our customers better.

• You have a bright open mind, you’re technically talented, and you want to make a difference in the world.
• You enjoy getting involved in complex projects that resolve into seamless human experiences. Anything related to health, and particularly mental health, requires rigorous security and a heartfelt care for protecting people’s business, which you possess in abundance.
• You relish a challenge. You care deeply about the problems we’re solving and enjoy the fact that everyday you have to find a solution for a problem and are comfortable with short iteration cycles and ambitious deadlines.
• You possess strong written and verbal communication skills. A significant portion of our team work remotely, so fluent, honest and direct communication is essential.
• You’re a team player. You value autonomy while also respecting your colleague and learning from their knowledge and experience.
• You’re a self-starter. You’re an independent thinker and tinkerer, you won’t wait around to be told what to do, you pick up your tools and get going. You possess abundant initiative to start your own projects.
• You contribute beyond your job description sharing ideas, concerns, and solutions.

What your weekly routine might look like?

As a HealthRhythms’ employee, we will support you finding a custom, flexible work schedule that enables you to thrive personally and professionally. Your day-to-day will have minimal distractions. Meetings are only as frequently as they need to be and always as short as they can be. We have a weekly planning call, and a quick weekly
all-hands call. We use GSuite with Chat and Meet to connect and Monday.com to manage our roadmap and tasks. We are always open to optimizing our workflow.

Benefits and Perks

• Help build a fast-growing company in an dynamic field
• Employer-covered health insurance and a flexible vacation policy
• Early-stage startup equity with potential for significant increase in value
• A talented team of intelligent and supportive people
• The opportunity to improve mental health for millions of people across the world!

We believe that diversity makes us better: we welcome people from all backgrounds.

Want to apply?

To apply please email us at jobs@healthrhythms.com telling us the job title you are applying for, a little about yourself, and why you are applying for this role. Please include your resume and include links to previous projects you enjoyed working on or think may be relevant.

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