Senior Backend Engineer (TypeScript, AWS Serverless) - Part-time - Worldwide

About the Company

DocMaps is an AI phone assistant helping patients find doctors across Canada. We address the shortage of family physicians while supporting government and healthcare stakeholders in understanding capacity. Built by a founder with a data science background, DocMaps is entering pilot projects and looking to strengthen its engineering foundation for scale, reliability, and compliance.

The Engagement

Engagement: ~20 hrs/week, typically one month per quarter (flexible, recurring)
Target Start: Early November

The Role

We’re seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to refactor our codebase, improve scalability, and establish best practices across our AWS serverless stack. You’ll work closely with the founder and product stakeholders to design robust services, streamline code, and enhance logging/observability as we prepare for growth and pilot rollouts.

What You’ll Do

• Architect & Refactor: Lead design improvements and codebase refactoring for a TypeScript-based serverless platform (AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Serverless Framework).
• Build Services & APIs: Develop scalable, testable, and well-documented backend services and integrations with external APIs.
• Scalability & Reliability: Improve performance, resiliency, and cost efficiency; implement caching, retries, and fault-tolerant patterns.
• Observability: Enhance logging, metrics, and tracing to enable actionable monitoring and faster incident response.
• Security & Compliance: Collaborate on healthcare-grade security practices (privacy, encryption, access controls) and align with relevant standards (e.g., PHIPA/PIPEDA/HIPAA concepts).
• Best Practices: Introduce coding standards, CI/CD hygiene, and operational playbooks suited to a lean team.
• Collaboration: Partner with product and (as needed) data/AI teammates to deliver features supporting patient matching, underwriting-like rules, and operational workflows.
• Lightweight Assignment: Participate in a brief take-home or live exercise as part of our process.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience: 5+ years in backend engineering; solution-architecture experience is a plus.
• Tech Stack: Strong with TypeScript and AWS serverless (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway).
• Frameworks/Tooling: Hands-on with the Serverless Framework; familiarity with CI/CD and infrastructure automation.
• Data & Integrations: Comfortable designing data models for DynamoDB and integrating with third-party APIs.
• Reliability Mindset: Proven track record improving performance, reliability, and observability (structured logs, metrics, traces).
• Healthcare Compliance: Experience in regulated environments and healthcare compliance concepts (PHIPA/PIPEDA/HIPAA) is strongly preferred.
• Communication & Ownership: Clear communicator who can operate independently, make pragmatic decisions, and document well.
• Time Zone: Ability to join one live meeting per week in Eastern Time.

Nice to Have

• Experience with event-driven patterns (queues, pub/sub), step functions, and idempotent workflows.
• Familiarity with cost optimization in serverless environments.
• Background building solutions for North American customers or public-sector/healthcare contexts.