Senior Backend Developer

About Valeo Health

Valeo Health is a preventive health and wellness platform active in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, providing services like diagnostics, teleconsultation, AI-driven health analytics, supplements, and care programs. The company focuses on developing AI-first, scalable, and compliant healthcare platforms that manage sensitive health data while delivering reliable, quality experiences across regions.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Backend Developer specialized in Java and microservices to design, develop, and maintain backend services powering Valeo Health’s platform in KSA and UAE. This senior individual contributor position emphasizes deep technical expertise, including service design, coding, and peer code reviews. You will also mentor junior engineers and influence architectural decisions without people management responsibilities, ideal for those who prefer to advance their engineering skills.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, develop, and maintain Java microservices handling sensitive health-related data at scale.
• Take full ownership of the technical design for services—creating design documents, leading reviews, and making architecture trade-offs.
• Ensure high standards in code quality, testing, monitoring, and operational excellence.
• Investigate and resolve production issues, perform root cause analyses, and lead remediation efforts.
• Enhance service performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Mentor 2–3 junior backend developers through pairing, code and design reviews, and learning sessions.
• Organize technical knowledge-sharing such as brown-bag sessions covering patterns, post-mortems, and tools.
• Support junior engineers' professional growth by identifying challenging projects and offering structured feedback.
• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for less experienced backend engineers.
• Collaborate with front-end and mobile teams on API design and integration.
• Partner with Product Managers on technical solution designs and trade-offs.
• Work alongside DevOps/SRE teams on infrastructure, deployments, and incident management.
• Participate in recruitment by reviewing resumes, conducting interviews, and calibrating candidate assessments.
• Ensure code and designs comply with healthcare data regulations including HIPAA, UAE and KSA PDPL.
• Implement secure data handling practices including encryption, audit trails, and access controls.
• Maintain documentation necessary for security audits and reviews.

Required Qualifications

• 5–7 years of professional experience in software engineering focused on backend development.
• At least 3 years of experience building production Java applications using Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, or similar frameworks.
• Proven experience designing and operating microservices in production environments.
• Demonstrable mentoring experience, formally or informally aiding junior engineers' development.
• Startup experience is advantageous due to comfort with ambiguity and multi-role responsibilities.
• Prior exposure to healthcare, fintech, or other regulated industries is a plus.
• Technical expertise with Java 8+ and Spring ecosystem including Spring Boot, Cloud, and Data.
• Strong knowledge of microservices architecture aspects like service discovery, API gateways, asynchronous messaging, circuit breakers, and idempotent operations.
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis.
• Hands-on familiarity with message brokers like Kafka, RabbitMQ, and AWS SQS, plus event-driven systems.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) covering compute, networking, IAM, and managed services.
• Solid REST API design skills; knowledge of gRPC or GraphQL is beneficial.
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or New Relic.
• Strong testing skills across unit, integration, and contract tests.
• Understanding of CI/CD workflows and containerized deployments using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of data security practices, encryption, and handling of personally identifiable information and protected health information.

Engineering Mindset

• Strong systems thinking with ability to balance correctness, performance, and operability.
• Clear and concise communication skills including writing technical specifications and managing design discussions.
• Ability to remain composed and decisive during incident situations.
• Genuine curiosity about healthcare domain to understand the impact of features beyond implementation.

Expected Impact Within First Year

• Deliver 2-3 major backend services or upgrades with tangible improvements in reliability or performance.
• Help junior engineers progress toward higher roles through mentorship and broader responsibilities.
• Reduce production incidents quarter over quarter in your service area.
• Become the go-to technical expert for complex backend challenges among teammates.
• Contribute effectively to the hiring process enhancing candidate evaluation and throughput.

Why Join Valeo Health

This position offers an opportunity to create and scale compliant healthcare backend systems for international markets in a senior technical role with significant ownership. The company offers clear career progression on the individual contributor path toward Staff Engineer or lateral moves to Tech Lead and Engineering Manager roles.