Staff Platform Engineer (Edge & Ingestion)

Synthesis Health

Who We Are

We’re a mission- and values-driven company with tremendous dedication to our customers. Our 100% remote team is dedicated to a common goal – to revolutionize healthcare through innovation, collaboration, and commitment to our core values and behaviors.

About the Opportunity

We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to serve as the architect of our edge.

In this critical role, you will own the boundary between the world and our platform. You will own the "Customer Edge"—the mission-critical software gateways that run inside hospital networks, acting as the secure bridge for DICOM and HL7 data into our cloud platform.

You will solve unique distributed systems challenges: How do you buffer terabytes of imaging data on-premise when the hospital's internet goes down? How do you safely auto-update thousands of remote agents behind strict enterprise firewalls? How do you enforce fairness and rate limiting to prevent one tenant from degrading the experience for everyone else?

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will write high-performance code, define the architectural patterns for edge ingestion, and mentor engineers on the nuances of network reliability and secure tunneling.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Gateway Architecture & High Availability (HA)

  • On-Premise Gateway Reliability: You will architect our edge gateway software to run reliably within customer data centers. You will implement HA patterns to ensure that a single hardware failure never stops critical patient data flow.
  • High-Performance Ingestion: You will optimize the ingestion path for massive DICOM studies and HL7 streams. You will implement local queuing and backpressure mechanisms that protect our core platform from being overwhelmed by "thundering herds" of data when connectivity is restored after an outage.
  • Versioning & Fleet Management: You will design the control plane for our distributed fleet of gateways. You will solve the "Day 2" operations challenge: architecting automated, over-the-air (OTA) update mechanisms that allow us to patch, upgrade, and version-manage thousands of remote agents without manual intervention or customer downtime.

Cloud Ingestion & Throughput Protection

  • Resilient Ingestion Strategy: You will design the cloud-side ingestion layer (using technologies like Kafka or PubSub) to absorb massive bursts of traffic. You will ensure that our architecture can handle "thundering herds" from reconnected agents without dropping a single packet of patient data.
  • Load Shedding & Fairness: You will implement sophisticated fairness algorithms and load shedding strategies at the ingestion point to ensure that no single customer gateway can monopolize cloud resources or degrade the performance of the broader platform.

Network & Connectivity Security

  • Secure Tunnels: You will design the secure connectivity patterns (e.g., mutual TLS, reverse tunnels, VPNs) that allow our cloud to communicate with private hospital networks without requiring complex firewall exceptions.
  • Mentorship: You will be the subject matter expert (SME) on networking and edge computing. You will mentor the team on TCP/IP mechanics, TLS optimization, and low-level network debugging.

 

What We’re Looking For

  • Deep Edge & Networking Experience: 8+ years of engineering experience, with a focus on Edge Computing or Distributed Agents. You understand the physics of the internet, from TCP congestion control to TLS handshakes.
  • Hybrid/On-Prem Expertise: You have shipped software that runs in customer environments (on-prem). You understand the constraints of enterprise firewalls, proxies, and limited bandwidth.
  • Language Fluency: Deep expertise in Go (Golang) or TypeScript is required.
  • Queuing & Streaming: Expert-level knowledge of asynchronous architectures using Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Dataflow, or Kafka. Given our GCP environment, deep proficiency with Pub/Sub and Dataflow is highly preferred. You understand backpressure and how to design for eventual consistency.
  • Containerization: Experience distributing software via Docker/Kubernetes and managing container lifecycles in remote environments.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Healthcare Interoperability: Deep, hands-on experience building integrations against DICOM (C-STORE, DIMSE services) or HL7 MLLP protocols. You understand the nuances of the association negotiation, transfer syntaxes, and strict acknowledgment requirements necessary to reliably accept data from legacy hospital systems.

 

Why You Should Join Us

  • Solve Our Toughest Puzzles: This is a high-leverage role. You will be working on the most impactful technical challenges that are critical to the company's success.
  • Define the Architecture: You won't just be maintaining a system; you will be a primary author of its future state, with the autonomy to make it happen.
  • Lead from the Front: This is a chance to establish yourself as a key technical voice in a rapidly growing company.
  • Competitive Compensation & Benefits: We offer a strong salary, a 100% remote culture, and significant opportunities for growth.

We are a values-driven company. Our values:

  • Clinical service first.
  • Collaborate with our customers.
  • Listen, respect, learn.
  • Innovate to excel.

The behaviors we look for:

  • Be nice.
  • Be creative.
  • Be honest.
  • Be helpful.

Compensation and Benefits

Typical salary range for this position is $120,000 - $150,000 (CAD). However, Synthesis participates in location based hiring and salary ranges can be adjusted based on candidate's residence. 

Other benefits include, but are not limited to: Medical, Dental, Vision, “Use as needed” vacation policy, and participation in our employee option program.

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