Lead Platform Engineer (Founding Team) jobs in United States
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Sonar · 3 weeks ago

Lead Platform Engineer (Founding Team)

positionUnited States
timePart-time
remoteRemote
senioritySenior Level, Lead/Staff
date6+ years exp

Sonar is a mission-driven startup founded out of Stanford that is redefining society's ability to deliver personalized mental health support at scale. The Lead Platform Engineer will own systems end-to-end, from API design to distributed infrastructure, while collaborating closely with the founding team to architect resilient services and support an AI-driven wellbeing companion.

Health CareMental HealthPersonal Health

Responsibilities

Design, build, and scale backend services across NestJS/TypeScript and Python/Django, including APIs, data models, authentication, and integrations
Architect and evolve our cloud infrastructure, primarily on AWS (EKS, RDS, S3, SNS/SQS, SES, ECR) using Terraform modules and GitHub Actions pipelines
Contribute to and improve our multi-cloud capabilities, including light Azure and GCP support where needed (AI APIs, auth/workflows, data)
Own database modeling and performance across Prisma, Django ORM, PostgreSQL, and Amazon RDS
Build and extend internal and external integrations (Clerk auth, Twilio, Firebase Admin, Svix, OpenAI, third-party APIs)
Improve platform reliability, including observability (Sentry, logging/metrics), alerting, auto-scaling patterns, background jobs, messaging queues, and container orchestration
Drive performance and quality, from query optimization to caching, rate-limiting, back-pressure, and large-scale API tuning
Support our AI and analytics workflows, including Python services, Django systems, Redis/RabbitMQ, and BI pipelines (Tableau/BI)
Elevate our engineering standards—testing, code quality, documentation, and developer experience across the monorepo
Help shape technical decisions, collaborating with product, clinical, and engineering teams

Qualification

NestJSPython/DjangoAWS EKSTerraformPostgreSQLCI/CD pipelinesAPI designData modelingCommunicatorBuilder MentalityMission-alignedAutonomous & PragmaticFluent in English

Required

6+ years building production backend systems
Strong experience with NestJS/TypeScript and Python/Django
Skilled with Terraform, AWS (especially EKS), CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and production operations
Comfortable across AWS, with working knowledge of Azure and GCP
Strong understanding of relational schema design, migrations, indexing, query optimization, caching, API design, and distributed systems
You've taken backend systems from design → implementation → deployment → monitoring
Strong technical opinions with willingness to adapt
Able to lead decisions independently
Comfortable working in a mental-health context with a privacy-first mindset
Able to collaborate across product, business, clinical, and engineering/data teams
Remote
Fluent in English
Works in US Pacific Time

Preferred

Experience with multi-cloud patterns or AI/cloud integrations

Company

Sonar

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Glassdoor3.0
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Sonar is a healthcare company focusing on the proactive identification and intervention of mental health challenges in youth.
dateFounded in 2022
location
Mill Valley, California, USA
people-size2-10 employees
web-link
https://www.sonarmentalhealth.com

Funding

Current Stage
Early Stage
Total Funding
$2.4M
Key Investors
Nina Capital
2025-02-24Pre Seed· $2.4M

Leadership Team

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Drew Barvir
Co-Founder and CEO
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Company data provided by crunchbase