About Sonar

Sonar is a mission-driven startup founded out of Stanford that is redefining society's ability to deliver personalized mental health support at scale . Our core product, “Sonny”, provides 24/7 AI-enabled, human led, chat based support with trained coaches. This unique human-in-the-loop approach allows us to deliver safe, accessible and effective support at a reasonable cost and has been recognized by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and CNN.

Since our founding in 2022, we have scaled to support more than 20,000 youth across the United States, delivering improved mental health, grades, attendance and reduced tragedies. We are backed by leading institutions such as Stanford University, Informed Ventures, HopeLab and Nina Capital. We have 8 full-time employees, 4 part-time employees and 12 wellbeing coaches, all working remotely.

Role Overview

We’re looking for a senior backend & infrastructure engineer who loves owning systems end-to-end—from API design to distributed infrastructure. You’ll work across our core backend stack (NestJS, TypeScript, Prisma, PostgreSQL, Python/Django) and help strengthen the foundations of our cloud platform, built primarily on AWS EKS with Terraform. This is a high-impact role where you’ll collaborate closely with the founding team to architect resilient services, accelerate engineering velocity, and support our AI-driven wellbeing companion used by thousands of youth across the country.

What you’ll be doing

• 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.

Who you are

• Leader: Autonomous and self‑driven; strong opinions, loosely held—optimizing for what’s right for users and society.
• Backend-Focused Engineer: 6+ years building production backend systems; strong experience with NestJS/TypeScript and Python/Django, plus modern API and service architecture.
• Infrastructure-Driven: Skilled with Terraform, AWS (especially EKS), CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and production operations.
• Cloud Native: Comfortable across AWS, with working knowledge of Azure and GCP; experience with multi-cloud patterns or AI/cloud integrations a plus.
• Data & System Design Thinker: Strong understanding of relational schema design, migrations, indexing, query optimization, caching, API design, and distributed systems.
• Builder Mentality: You’ve taken backend systems from design → implementation → deployment → monitoring.
• Autonomous & Pragmatic: Strong technical opinions with willingness to adapt; able to lead decisions independently.
• Mission-aligned & User-aware: Comfortable working in a mental-health context with a privacy-first mindset.
• Strong Communicator: Able to collaborate across product, business, clinical, and engineering/data teams.
• Other Stuff: Remote • Fluent in English • Works in US Pacific Time