Platform Engineer - Backend Platform

Health can’t wait.

Not for symptoms to get worse. Not for a six‑month appointment. Not for a system to catch up. But that’s exactly how healthcare works today. You wait, until you can’t.

Alan exists to end the wait.

Health is a universal right, and we believe this right can only become real when it’s coupled with prevention. We need to stop treating health as something we repair and start treating it as something we build, every day. It’s not solely a question of willpower. It’s the healthcare system itself that needs to work for everyone, in a sustainable way.

So we are building the new standard in prevention insurance. Alan is the first company that integrates insurance, prevention, and care into a single, acclaimed user experience.

We are on an incredible journey to build a global leading company, with a unique culture. We already partner with 40K+ companies of all sizes, serving more than 1M+ members, and have reached €800M+ in ARR.

Prevention as the new norm. That's what we're building with our team of 1000+ people. If it speaks to you: we're hiring across France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. And beyond.

Every Alan product, in every country, runs on the same backend: events, queues, cache, data shared between components, transactions. More than 200 engineers build on it every day. It carries more than 1 million members today. It must carry 10 million, in more countries, with more regulated health data.

You would join Backend Platform, a new team in our engineering organisation. Our job is to rethink the backend of a fully grown company, while it keeps running. Today almost everything runs in one Python monolith on one database. We are moving it towards big services that scale on their own, one pilot at a time. We build the tools that make this possible, and we set the rules for how Alan builds backends.

This is a rare kind of project. The codebase serves real members and customers every day, and we have the mandate to change how it is built. What we decide now will shape how hundreds of engineers work for years. You will learn a lot, and your work will have a real impact.

The team is small and growing: 3 engineers today, 6 next year. Its mission:

Own the backend building blocks every Alan product depends on, and make them simple enough that product teams use them without needing us.

Your scope

• The events pipeline. How our components and services talk to each other asynchronously: a Postgres outbox, Redis Streams, an S3 archive. It is in production for about 20 components. You make it a product that teams use on their own.
• Data replication between services. A service publishes read-only tables. Other services keep a local, fresh copy and join on it. This replaces slow joins across components.
• Towards big services. The tools to take capabilities out of the monolith: a service template, APIs between services, traces across services, dependency management. We start with a pilot and turn it into a playbook.
• The shared runtime. Queues, cache, the transaction layer. Their limits, their SLOs, their headroom.
• The backend direction. The rules for how we build backends at Alan, written with the other engineering teams.

🛠️ The stack

Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Redis, RQ, Datadog, all in a monorepo. New services are async-first. We deploy daily and believe in distributed ownership: you build it, you own it. You don't need prior Python experience.

⭐ Is it you we're looking for?

• 5+ years of backend engineering, with code other teams depend on: libraries, frameworks, pipelines, internal platforms. You ran it in production and owned it.
• Distributed systems as a daily tool: events and messaging (delivery guarantees, ordering, idempotence, retries), data replication, consistency, transactions.
• PostgreSQL in depth: transactions, locks, replication, query plans.
• You have split a monolith or built services, step by step, while production kept running.
• You measure before you optimise, and you set SLOs and alerts for what you own.
• English working proficiency. French is not required.

Mindset we value

• Product mindset. Product teams are your customers. Adoption is how you measure success.
• Enabler. You build things others use on their own, instead of doing the work for them.
• You write to think and align. Short framing docs and decision records are how this team works with the rest of engineering.
• Influence without authority. You get other teams to change how they build, with no reporting line.
• Incremental. One pilot first, then the playbook. No big-bang rewrites.

Strong plus: you worked in a platform team that served product teams · event-driven architecture at scale · CDC or logical replication · async Python (asyncio, FastAPI) · multi-region or data residency · health, payments or other regulated data.

Not required: frontend · Kubernetes and cluster operations · database administration · LLM or AI expertise. Other teams own those.

Mission alignment

• Healthcare technology excites you.
• Leveraging AI to redefine our roles and unlock scalability.

For this opportunity, we are aiming to hire at D level or above. These are senior individual-contributor seats. Your leverage comes from technical depth and from how many teams use what you build.

But above all, we are looking for high potential and curiosity: make sure to show us this when you apply! Everything else is a bonus.

• Location: You must be legally eligible to work in France, Belgium, or Spain.
• Remote work: We offer remote work flexibility, but we value in-person collaboration.

🎯 Important note: we hire people, not roles.

If you're excited about this opportunity but don't check every box, we'd love to hear from you. Everyone, no matter how underrepresented, should feel free to apply, as it can only bring learnings or success.

If you identify yourself as a woman: Did you know that research shows women often apply only when meeting 100% of requirements?

Remember, this is just a guide, not a checklist.

We'll be thrilled to receive your application!

🔖 Check out our About Alan and Career pages, as well as our Medium, blog and Glassdoor page for more info.

You want to know more about Alan?

• 🙌 Perks & Benefits: Alaners are provided with a stimulating environment and perks ensuring they are happy, efficient and spend only high-quality time with co-workers.
• 🤘 A strong culture: People joining Alan are often surprised and delighted by our innovative working method. We have a set of cultural values that guide our approach to work.