Software Engineer L2 - Real-Time Pharmacy Platform

About Curative

Curative is building the future of health insurance with a first-of-its-kind employer-based plan designed to remove financial barriers and make care truly accessible: one monthly premium with $0 copays and $0 deductibles*. Backed by our recent $150M in Series B funding and valuation at $1.275B, Curative is scaling rapidly and investing in AI-powered service, deeper member engagement, and a smart network designed for today’s workforce.

Our north star guides everything we do: healthcare only works when people can actually use it. That belief drives every decision we make: from how we design our plan, support our members, to how we collaborate as a team.

If you want to do meaningful work with a team that moves fast, experiments boldly, and cares deeply, Curative is the place to do it. We’re growing fast and looking for teammates who want to help transform health insurance for the better.

Summary
We’re hiring a forward deployed software engineer to architect, build, and own a brand-new real-time benefits management platform — an always-on system that operations specialists, members, and external partners will rely on every single day. It’s a rare chance to build a high-impact service from the ground up.

You’ll sit at the exciting intersection of engineering and operations — embedded with the people who use the software, not insulated from them. You’ll join team meetings, hear firsthand what’s broken, and ship in quick, iterative cycles. You’ll also be the person watching the dashboards — tracking how the platform is performing and how it’s actually being used, then making adjustments backed by data.

You’ll be the technical point of responsibility for this service — and the person who gets to set its direction. You’ll partner with product and operations stakeholders to turn workflows into shipped software, drive the architectural vision, and champion the platform in cross-team discussions.

How we build

At Curative, AI writes most of the code. Engineers direct it. We use agentic AI coding tools as the primary development surface. Most engineers here routinely runs multiple agents in parallel — one implementing a feature, one resolving review comments, one chasing down a flaky test. The engineers job is to set context, make the decisions the AI can't make, and keep the bar high on what ships.

This is not a role for someone who wants to hand-roll every line. It is also not a role for someone who will accept whatever the AI produces. We are looking for the engineer in between: strong enough fundamentals to catch a wrong answer in a few seconds, disciplined enough to review every diff, and ambitious enough to drive several times the output of a traditional IC. Strong systems and architecture thinking is important, as is product taste. This is a fully remote position

What you'll own

• The codebase. A full-stack Python + TypeScript application with significant domain complexity. You own code review, architectural decisions, and the quality bar. Most commits will be AI-authored, human-directed, human-reviewed. All of them are yours.
• AI leverage. The internal tooling, prompts, skills, and evals that let one engineer operate a service of this scope. You will extend it.
• Production — and uptime. This is an always-on service, so production is the heart of the role. You own the cloud infrastructure, deploy pipeline, observability, on-call, and cost — and you design for resilience: failover, monitoring that catches problems before users feel them, and disciplined incident response. Keeping this platform fast and available is one of the most satisfying challenges here.
• Operational metrics. You watch how the platform performs for the people who depend on it — not just availability and latency, but workflow completion rates, throughput, time-to-resolution, and the other metrics that tell you whether the software is actually helping end users. You surface what the data shows, propose changes, and close the loop.
• Stakeholder relationships. You are the engineer in the room with operations specialists, analysts, and ops leads. You translate their pain into scope, push back when a request won’t solve the real problem, and build trust by shipping reliably.
• The roadmap. Co-owning the product plan with operations and product stakeholders. Sequencing work, flagging what is infeasible, proposing alternatives — and sometimes arguing for the thing nobody asked for yet because you are close enough to the problem to see it.
• Strategy for your surface. You don’t just execute a roadmap handed to you — you shape it. You see patterns across user feedback, production data, and business goals, and propose what to build next.
• Integrations. A growing set of connections to other internal services and external partner and provider systems.
• The domain. You will not arrive an expert in this space, but within 90 days you will understand the workflows well enough that every prompt you write is loaded with the right context.

What we're looking for
Foundational skills (non-negotiable)

You need these because you are the last line of defense on what the AI produces. The bar is not "can write it from scratch in an interview" - the bar is "can read a 400-line AI-generated diff and spot the subtle bug in 90 seconds"

• 5+ years shipping production software. Enough reps that you recognize bad code before you can articulate why.
• Real fluency in Python and TypeScript. Not "I can read it" — fluent. You will direct work in both every day.
• Strong SQL and relational database fundamentals. You can read a query plan, spot an N+1, and know when a migration is unsafe at scale.
• Comfort with operational data. You have built or maintained dashboards, dug into usage metrics to find problems, and used data to argue for or against a product change.
• Systems thinking, with a bias toward resilience. Can sketch a service’s architecture on a whiteboard, identify the failure modes, design for graceful degradation, and reason about blast radius — because this system is expected to stay up.
• Scaling resilient systems. You have designed and operated services that stay fast and correct as load grows — horizontal scaling, caching, queueing and backpressure, idempotency and retries, rate limiting, connection and resource pooling. You know how to find a bottleneck before it becomes an outage, and how to keep a system degrading gracefully instead of falling over under peak demand.
• Production cloud experience (AWS, GCP, or equivalent). You have been on-call for something real.
• Comfort working directly with non-technical stakeholders. You can run a 30-minute workflow review with an operations specialist, extract the real requirements, and leave them feeling heard — not bulldozed.
• Sharp written communication. You will spend more time writing prompts, specs, and PR descriptions than writing code.
  Note: prior experience in this specific domain is not required — and you don’t need a healthcare background at all. We care far more about your track record building and operating real-time, high-availability systems than the industry you did it in. E-commerce, fintech, infrastructure, gaming,healthcare — anywhere uptime is non-negotiable, that experience counts.

AI-first working style (also non-negotiable)

• You already use Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent as your primary development tool — not as a side autocomplete.
• You have opinions about how to structure prompts, when to split work into subagents, and how to keep AI output from drifting.
• You treat the AI as a junior engineer with infinite throughput: high leverage, zero judgment, needs supervision — so you review every diff and never merge on vibes.
• You enjoy building tooling that makes AI more effective on your codebase — skills, evals, fixtures, integrations.
• You see AI leverage as what makes it possible for one engineer to own a full product surface and stay close to users — not as a reason to stay heads-down in a terminal.

Strongly preferred

• A portfolio of AI-assisted work — skills you wrote, agents you built, automations you shipped.
• Experience being the single owner of a non-trivial service in production.

Why this role
Healthcare is one of the highest-leverage places software can make a difference, and we’re a company where a single engineer can own a service that thousands of members and partners depend on in real time. The scope is large, the problems are real, and the stakes are immediate. Best of all, the operating model — AI-first, human-directed, shipped daily — is the one you’ve been waiting for.
Your day might span debugging a production issue on a system that has to stay up, digging into reliability and usage metrics to understand why throughput dipped, demoing a shiny new workflow to an ops lead, or setting the technical strategy for your platform. If you’ve been looking for a role where you own the full loop — from problem discovery through production — keep a real-time service humming, and treat AI-first as the actual way work gets done rather than a buzzword, this is it. We’d love to meet you.

Perks & Benefits 

• Curative Health Plan (100% employer-covered medical premiums for you and 50% coverage for dependents on the base plan.)

  • $0 copays and $0 deductibles (with completion of our Baseline Visit )

  • Preventive and primary care built in

  • Mental health support (Rula, Televero, Two Chairs, Recovery Unplugged)

  • One-on-one care navigation

  • Chronic condition programs (diabetes, weight, hypertension)

  • Maternity and family planning support

  • 24/7/365 Curative Telehealth

  • Pharmacy benefits 

• Comprehensive dental and vision coverage

• Employer-provided life and disability coverage with additional supplemental options

• Flexible spending accounts 

• Generous PTO policy plus 11 paid annual company holidays

• 401K for full-time employees

• Generous Up to 8–12 weeks paid parental leave, based on role eligibility.