Senior API Engineer — SDUI & Backend Operations

About the Company: 

Headspace Health is the world’s most accessible and comprehensive digital mental health and wellbeing platform. Headspace Health will democratize mental health and wellbeing so people around the world are supported by a full spectrum of affordable care. In addition to its vast library of mindfulness and meditation content, our behavioral health system offers emotional support, guidance, therapy, and medication from professional coaches, licensed therapists, and psychiatrists, respectively.

Our mission is to create a world where mental health is never an obstacle. By harnessing the power and convenience of a smartphone, Headspace Health is able to provide access to high-quality care to anyone, anywhere, in order to reduce symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression.

Role summary
Lead the design and operation of APIs that power Server-Driven UI  for Flutter clients while owning backend services across the stack. You’ll design stable UI contracts and compose client payloads, be comfortable diving into other backend codebases to implement features and fix production issues, participate in the on-call rotation to keep services healthy and low-latency, and drive team capability for SDUI.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement robust RESTful APIs for SDUI, auth, and rate limiting.
• Implement composition/templating logic that returns client-ready UI payloads with capability-aware fallbacks.
• Champion SDUI capability across the team: coach engineers, run hands-on workshops, create onboarding/docs, and promote SDUI best practices.
• Work across multiple backend repositories: add features, refactor, and maintain code quality.
• Operate production services: own SLAs, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and participate in on-call rotation.
• Improve reliability and performance (caching, CDN strategies, Redis, profiling, autoscaling and load testing).
• Build and maintain CI/CD, testing, and observability (metrics, tracing, logs, dashboards).
• Integrate personalization, experimentation hooks, and feature flags into delivery flow.
• Collaborate closely with mobile/web teams to define contracts and client compatibility.
• Mentor peers, lead design reviews, and drive API and schema governance and backward-compatibility practices.

Required skills & experience

• 7+ years building production microservices and APIs.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with active participation in team ceremonies and the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, and design.
• Strong Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) experience, including effective use of abstraction and dependency injection patterns to build modular, testable, and maintainable backend systems.
• Hands-on development in TypeScript for backend services.
• Proven RESTful API design and contract experience.
• Solid experience with databases and caching technologies, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis, with an understanding of data modeling, query performance, and cache strategies.
• Strong with AWS (API Gateway/Lambda or ECS/EC2, S3, CloudFront, RDS/ElastiCache or equivalents).
• Experience with containerization using Docker (image build, Docker Compose, registries, running services in containers).
• Strong testing experience including automated testing and manual verification.
• Experience with production support: alerting, runbooks, incident management, and on-call duties.
• Familiar with CI/CD, automated testing, and observability tooling (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
• Advanced English proficiency (B2–C1 or higher).

Nice to have

• Terraform or other IaC for managing AWS resources.
• Experience instrumenting endpoints and surfacing behavior in analytics platforms such as Amplitude (event schemas, dashboards, alerts).
• Experience using Statsig, Grafana, and Sentry for experimentation, dashboards, error tracking, and incident diagnostics.
• Protobuf experience (service/event schema management via service-protos).
• Background in personalization/experimentation systems.
• Hands-on development in Python for backend services.

Hiring signals

• Examples of evolving APIs without breaking clients and measurable reliability/performance improvements.
• Proven track record of mentoring and up-skilling engineers—especially enabling teams to adopt and own SDUI patterns.
• Evidence of effective on-call ownership: resolved incidents, improved runbooks/alerts, postmortems.
• Code that shows strong testing, observability, and cross-repo contributions.
  

Perks:

• We welcome new ideas and allow you to make an immediate impact on the team
• Health/Sport budget
• Remote work
• Flexible PTO
• Global offices
• Fun, positive, collaborative environment!