Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

About Ladder

We saw a problem within the life insurance industry: getting covered took too long, involved too much paperwork, and required too many in-person meetings with sales agents. Having lost his father at a young age, our CEO, Jamie, was determined to make it easier for people to get the coverage they needed to provide for their families. So, we got to work. We developed a method of real-time underwriting leveraging AI and, in doing so, reduced the months-long process of applying for life insurance to minutes. Our digital experience is quick (instant decisions!), loved by users (check out our Trustpilot or Google reviews) and prolific ($74 billion+ in coverage provided).

About the role  

We are looking for a powerhouse Staff Software Engineer with battle-tested experience building ETL pipelines at massive scale. You will take ownership of our toughest backend and data plumbing challenges, bridging our transactional systems (Datomic) with our analytical and streaming infrastructure (BigQuery, Kafka, Flink, DBT) to architect resilient, elegant, and high-volume data pipelines. If you dream in immutable data structures and love using functional programming to untangle architectural knots, we need you. 

The ideal candidate brings demonstrated experience in software engineering, leadership maturity and a deep understanding of  engineering infrastructure.  This is a remote role based in one of the 22 States Ladder is currently hiring in - AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, KS, MA, MD, MN, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, TX, VA, WA, WI.  Please note, Ladder is not currently sponsoring or transferring OPT or H1-B visa's.

How You'll Make a Difference

As a senior technical leader on the team, you won't just be writing code, you'll be shaping our entire data strategy. You will:

• Architect and Build: Design, deploy, and scale robust data pipelines that reliably move and transform data between Datomic, Kafka, and BigQuery.
• Tame the Chaos: Build elegant, fault-tolerant ETL systems leveraging frameworks like DBT to ingest, sanitize, and normalize messy, unstructured data from dozens of third-party APIs and legacy vendors.
• Master the Stream: Evolve our event-driven architecture, optimizing streaming performance (Kafka/BEAM) to support real-time machine learning models
• Drive Technical Excellence: Act as a force multiplier for the engineering team. You'll set standards for backend architecture in Clojure, mentor peers, and make high-stakes technical decisions that scale with our rapid growth.
• Bridge the Gap: Partner closely with Data Science, Product and Business Development teams to ensure our data infrastructure proactively serves the evolving needs of the business.

Who You Are

• A seasoned technical leader: You bring 8+ years of rigorous software or data engineering experience to the table, backed by a strong academic foundation (BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field). You have a proven track record operating at a Staff or Principal level, where you don't just write code - you define technical strategy and mentor teams.
• A Clojure authority: You have deep, production-grade experience natively architecting complex backend systems in Clojure and the JVM. Functional programming and immutable data structures aren't just concepts to you; they are your preferred tools for building highly reliable software.
• A medallion architect: You have 4+ battle-tested years designing high-volume ETL/ELT pipelines at massive scale. You are an expert at structuring data lakes through Raw/Bronze, Cleansed/Silver, and Curated/Gold layers, and you rely on advanced dbt modeling to ensure pristine data quality.
• A modern data stack master: You have extensive, hands-on experience operating cloud data warehouses (specifically BigQuery), streaming infrastructure (Kafka), and processing frameworks (Apache Beam, Flink, or Spark). Wrangling messy, unstructured third-party API data into clean, ready-to-query models is second nature to you.
• An autonomous systems thinker: You thrive in ambiguity and deeply understand the harsh realities of distributed systems. You don't just patch bugs; you design elegant, event-driven architectures that prevent entire classes of problems from happening in the first place.

Technologies We Use

• Backend: Clojure, JVM
• Data: Datomic, BigQuery, BEAM, Sigma, SQL
• Infrastructure: Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Packer, Terraform, GCP, GraphQL
• Frontend: Typescript, JavaScript, React

What we Offer 

Ladder is highly collaborative and fun. To support you in your role, we offer fantastic perks and benefits that reflect our mission of care and support, including:

• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage | We offer competitive healthcare,dental and vision plans for you and your family.
• Flexible paid time off | Take the time that you need to rest and recharge, including our week-long winter holiday closure. 
• Stock options | We offer competitive stock option packages to participate in the success of building Ladder
• A rewarding 401k match program | We'll match up to 4% of your contributions as you save for your retirement goals.
• Ladder Fit Program | Your health matters. That’s why Ladder provides a monthly reimbursement for wellness-related expenses.
• Commuter benefits | When you work from the office, you will receive pre-tax 
• benefits for your commute and free parking.
• A stocked, beautiful new office | Located in downtown Palo Alto, our office was specifically designed to accommodate all working styles. We've invested in technology to support our hybrid team, plus we provide office snacks and daily catered lunches so that team members can work well and have fun together.
• Paid parental leave | We think it's crucial that new parents have time to adjust to their new lives without worrying about work, so we provide all parents inclusive of birthing, adoption, or fostering ten weeks of paid baby bonding.
• Work-from-home flexibility and support | We recognize that everyone's homelife is different and support remote and hybrid work. Upon joining, we provide a one-time remote office stipend for all team members and then a monthly stipend to cover WFH costs such as the internet.
• Fun company-wide events | Whether we work locally or remotely, we genuinely enjoy spending time together. That’s why we plan fun virtual and in-person events to let loose and laugh.

The base pay range targeted for this position is $160,000 - $230,000. This role is eligible for equity and benefits as shared above. Base pay is determined by market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Ladder is building a diverse team of talented and enthusiastic people. We are an equal opportunity workplace. At Ladder, differences are celebrated and supported to benefit our people, product, and community. Let us know why you're interested in this position and what unique contributions you can make to the Ladder team. We look forward to hearing from you.

Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don't apply for roles if they don't meet all the criteria – unlike majority candidates meeting significantly fewer requirements. We strongly encourage you to apply if you’re interested: we'd love to know how you can elevate our team with your unique experience!

Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About Ladder

We saw a problem within the life insurance industry: getting covered took too long, involved too much paperwork, and required too many in-person meetings with sales agents. Having lost his father at a young age, our CEO, Jamie, was determined to make it easier for people to get the coverage they needed to provide for their families. So, we got to work. We developed a method of real-time underwriting leveraging AI and, in doing so, reduced the months-long process of applying for life insurance to minutes. Our digital experience is quick (instant decisions!), loved by users (check out our Trustpilot or Google reviews) and prolific ($74 billion+ in coverage provided).

About the role  

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to accelerate developer productivity across Ladder's engineering organization. You'll own and modernize our CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and developer tooling - while also contributing to the reliability of our cloud infrastructure and data platform. 

The ideal candidate brings demonstrated experience in software engineering, leadership maturity and a deep understanding of  engineering infrastructure. 

This is a remote role based in one of the 22 States Ladder is currently hiring in - AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, KS, MA, MD, MN, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, TX, VA, WA, WI.  Please note, Ladder is not currently sponsoring or transferring OPT or H1-B visa's.

How You'll Make a Difference

As a senior engineer on the team, you won't just be writing code, you'll be shaping our platform strategy. You will:

• Improve developer velocity across the engineering organization. You'll measure and optimize the inner loop -  how long it takes an engineer to go from code change to confident production deployment. This includes build times, test parallelization, deployment rollout speed, and the tooling engineers interact with every day.
• Shape the architecture of Ladder's production infrastructure. You'll evaluate trade-offs and make high-impact technical decisions — like whether to replace custom monitoring tooling with native cloud provider integrations, or redesign how we rebuild data pipelines when upstream logic changes. You'll be the person who sees the big picture across systems and decides where to invest engineering effort.

• Participate in incident response for infrastructure, run retrospectives, and help drive follow-through on fixes as part of the team.

• Systematically pay down infrastructure tech debt. You'll partner with your team to identify legacy systems that have been superseded by better alternatives and build a roadmap to retire them — migrating from bespoke systems to native integrations, cleaning up remnants of past cloud migrations, and upgrading components that have drifted behind. 
• You'll raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance -  not through formal management, but through the quality and clarity of your technical work.

Who You Are

• A functional programming expert: You have deep production experience with Clojure or another functional language and are excited to work in a Clojure-and-JVM environment. Prior Clojure experience is a strong plus.
• An expert with CI/CD and Build pipelines: You have battle-tested experience profiling and optimizing CI/CD pipelines for large codebases, possess intricate knowledge of monorepo build tools like Bazel and Buck, and know how to solve issues related to build and test slowness.
• An Infrastructure enthusiast: You have extensive experience with cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, Datomic, BigQuery and cloud platforms like GCP.
• A Systems Thinker: You possess a deep understanding of software design and architecture. You don't just patch bugs; you design elegant systems that prevent entire classes of problems.
• A Self Starter: You thrive in ambiguity. You can take a high-level, messy business problem, define the technical constraints, and drive the solution from ideation to deployment.

Experience Required

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in infrastructure/platform roles
• BS, MS in Computer Science or related technical field a strong plus
• Must-have: Kubernetes, GCP (or equivalent cloud), CI/CD pipeline design, Docker, infrastructure-as-code, JVM operational experience, BigQuery, Kafka
• Strong plus: Clojure, Datomic, Datadog or similar observability platform, monorepo build tools (Buck, Bazel)
• Nice-to-have: Go, Python, Beam/Dataflow, 

What we Offer 

Ladder is highly collaborative and fun. To support you in your role, we offer fantastic perks and benefits that reflect our mission of care and support, including:

• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage | We offer competitive healthcare,dental and vision plans for you and your family.
• Flexible paid time off | Take the time that you need to rest and recharge, including our week-long winter holiday closure. 
• Stock options | We offer competitive stock option packages to participate in the success of building Ladder
• A rewarding 401k match program | We'll match up to 4% of your contributions as you save for your retirement goals.
• Ladder Fit Program | Your health matters. That’s why Ladder provides a monthly reimbursement for wellness-related expenses.
• Commuter benefits | When you work from the office, you will receive pre-tax 
• benefits for your commute and free parking.
• A stocked, beautiful new office | Located in downtown Palo Alto, our office was specifically designed to accommodate all working styles. We've invested in technology to support our hybrid team, plus we provide office snacks and daily catered lunches so that team members can work well and have fun together.
• Paid parental leave | We think it's crucial that new parents have time to adjust to their new lives without worrying about work, so we provide all parents inclusive of birthing, adoption, or fostering ten weeks of paid baby bonding.
• Work-from-home flexibility and support | We recognize that everyone's homelife is different and support remote and hybrid work. Upon joining, we provide a one-time remote office stipend for all team members and then a monthly stipend to cover WFH costs such as the internet.
• Fun company-wide events | Whether we work locally or remotely, we genuinely enjoy spending time together. That’s why we plan fun virtual and in-person events to let loose and laugh.

The base pay range targeted for this position is $145,000 - $192,000. This role is eligible for equity and benefits as shared above. Base pay is determined by market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Ladder is building a diverse team of talented and enthusiastic people. We are an equal opportunity workplace. At Ladder, differences are celebrated and supported to benefit our people, product, and community. Let us know why you're interested in this position and what unique contributions you can make to the Ladder team. We look forward to hearing from you.

Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don't apply for roles if they don't meet all the criteria – unlike majority candidates meeting significantly fewer requirements. We strongly encourage you to apply if you’re interested: we'd love to know how you can elevate our team with your unique experience!

Senior Software Engineer Job Description

Senior Software Engineer will develop information systems by studying operations; designing, developing and installing software solutions; support and develop software team. The Senior Software Engineer will lead a team of developers responsible for building new and support existing websites.

Ability to prioritize well, communicate clearly, have a consistent track record of delivery and excellent software engineering skills. Creative engineering balanced with high quality and a customer focus. Must be able to work across multiple facets of the project and juggle multiple responsibilities at the same time. Strong analytic capability and the ability to create innovative solutions. We are looking for a highly motivated individual who is looking to grow their career in a fast paced environment.

Responsibilities:

• Develop software solutions by studying information needs; conferring with users; studying systems flow, data usage and work processes; investigating problem areas; following the software development lifecycle
• Determine operational feasibility by evaluating analysis, problem definition, requirements, solution development and proposed solutions
• Document and demonstrate solutions by developing documentation, flowcharts, layouts, diagrams, charts, code comments and clear code
• Prepare and install solutions by determining and designing system specifications, standards and programming
• Improve operations by conducting systems analysis; recommending changes in policies and procedures
• Update job knowledge by studying state-of-the-art development tools, programming techniques and computing equipment; participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal networks; participating in professional organizations
• Protect operations by keeping information confidential
• Provide information by collecting, analyzing and summarizing development and service issues
• Accomplish engineering and organization mission by completing related results as needed
• Support and develop software engineers by providing advice, coaching and educational opportunities

• First and foremost, developing software our users need
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers
• Collaborate with team to brainstorm and create new products
• Grow engineering teams by interviewing, recruiting and hiring
• Make informed decisions quickly and taking ownership of services and applications at scale
• Work collaboratively with others to achieve goals
• Be a persistent, creative problem ­solver
• Remain cool and effective in a crisis
• Stay on the leading edge of development practices
• Passionate about great technologies, especially open source
• Understand business needs and know how to create the tools to manage them

Qualifications:

• Master's degree in in appropriate field of study
• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Fluent with functional, imperative and object-­oriented languages; knowledge of Java, Scala, or Clojure, or JavaScript would be especially useful
• Either strong OOP or Functional Programing and modeling skills
• 4+ years professional experience in professional web development
• Fluent in JavaScript and PHP
• Experience coding, testing and documenting Drupal themes – including all front end functionality and templates – and modules – using contributed modules and developing custom modules as needed
• Experience working in an agile environment
• Experience building complex web systems that have been successfully delivered to customers
• Ability to take a project from scoping requirements through actual launch of the project
• Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams and management to collect requirements, identify tasks, provide estimates and meet production deadlines
• Experience with mission critical, 24x7 systems
• Experience implementing and consuming large scale web services
• Experience developing software utilizing workflow or ESB software
• Experience with professional software engineering best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing and operations

• Know the JVM and the ecosystem of supporting tools inside and out
• Eagerness and willingness to learn new technologies

Senior Software Engineer top skills & proficiencies:

• Analysis
• Software Design
• Software Documentation
• Software Testing
• Teamwork
• Programming Skills
• Software Development Fundamentals and Process
• Software Requirements
• Software Architecture
• Self-Directed
• Multitask
• Communication Skills
• Results Oriented
• High Energy
• Self-Motivated
• Experience Working in an Agile Environment

By joining our team as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in building cutting-edge AI products that directly impact how new therapies reach patients. We’re looking for an experienced ML engineer who is passionate about turning advanced AI research into scalable, real-world solutions. You thrive on solving complex problems, pay close attention to detail, and consistently seek to automate and improve processes. You shine as a collaborator and excel as an individual contributor, with the courage to tackle challenging problems and the humility to learn and adapt. Your initiative and discipline allow you to thrive while working remotely, and your high degree of empathy and communication skills makes you the kind of colleague everyone wants on their team. As an integral member of our fast-growing organization, you will leverage AI to transform clinical research and improve patient care.

What You’ll Be Working On:

• Build and deploy AI-driven products that accelerate clinical trials and improve patient outcomes. Your work will deliver scalable machine learning solutions to complex, real-world problems in clinical research.
• Develop advanced ML models and LLM-powered agents for critical use cases like patient recruitment, enrollment forecasting, and study feasibility. You’ll also help expand our AI knowledge base architecture to support these innovative solutions.
• Leverage modern cloud tools and MLOps best practices to build robust data pipelines and deploy models at scale. You’ll use technologies like Python (and Clojure), AWS services (Athena, Bedrock, SageMaker, etc.), dbt, Prefect, and CI/CD automation with monitoring to ensure models are reliable and up-to-date.
• Collaborate across teams of data scientists, product managers, designers, engineers, and domain experts to integrate AI capabilities into our platform (including Care Access products). Ensure these AI solutions seamlessly support and enhance clinical research workflows for end-users.
• Continuously learn and innovate. Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in ML/AI (LLMs, NLP, probabilistic modeling, etc.) and proactively bring new ideas to the team. You’ll have the freedom to experiment with cutting-edge techniques and turn promising prototypes into production features that drive our mission forward.

What You’ll Bring to OneStudyTeam:

• Extensive ML engineering experience: 5+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning solutions in production at scale. Proven ability to implement end-to-end ML pipelines from data ingestion to model serving for real-world applications used by real people.
• Strong programming and data skills: Proficiency in Python and its ML ecosystem (pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow/PyTorch), with clean and efficient coding practices. Comfortable working with large datasets, writing complex SQL queries, and leveraging modern data processing frameworks. Experience with functional programming (e.g. Clojure) is a plus but not required.
• Cloud and MLOps expertise: Experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS or similar) and containerization tools like Docker. Familiarity with MLOps best practices such as CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and monitoring model performance/data drift to ensure reliable, scalable deployments.
• Deep ML/AI knowledge: Strong understanding of machine learning fundamentals (model selection, training, evaluation, feature engineering) and statistical modeling. Familiarity with NLP and large language models is important.
• Analytical problem-solving: Ability to break down complex problems and devise effective, efficient ML solutions. You balance pragmatic engineering with scientific rigor, ensuring models are not only accurate but also performant and maintainable in production.
• Mission-driven and business-focused mindset: A passion for our mission to speed up clinical trials and improve patient outcomes. Empathy for patients, clinicians, and researchers drives you to build unbiased AI solutions.

The expected salary range for this role is $140,000 - $190,000 USD per year for full time team members.