Founding Software Engineer | Data Platform

Arlo
At Arlo, we’re transforming health insurance for small and medium-sized businesses across the U.S. Our mission is to make healthcare more affordable by driving innovation at every level of health plan design. Arlo brings affordable, high-quality, long-term oriented, and ethical health insurance to employers.
2024 marked our breakthrough year: we hit profitability, found strong market fit, and brought affordable healthcare to more than 250 businesses and their employees.
We’re a small but mighty team bringing wide-ranging expertise:
Developing mission-critical software at Palantir
Scaling a Y Combinator startup from the very first hire to Series A (50+ employees)
Creating actuarial models used by major health insurers
Led sales at major, nationwide insurance brokerages
Leading patient operations teams at a high-growth health plan startup
About the Role
As the Founding Software Engineer on our Data Platform team at Arlo, you will build the foundation for our ML-driven health insurance quoting system. You'll design and implement the entire data infrastructure that powers our core product, working at the intersection of data engineering and machine learning operations.
Key Responsibilities:
Design and build scalable data pipelines that process billions of healthcare claims records
Develop robust ETL workflows to ingest, normalize, and transform medical data from multiple sources
Create infrastructure for real-time ML inference serving hundreds of millions of predictions
Build developer tooling to accelerate the work of our data scientists and ML engineers
Architect and implement monitoring systems to ensure data quality and model performance
Optimize PySpark code for feature construction to improve performance and efficiency
Projects You'll Lead:
Healthcare Data Platform:
Build a unified data platform that ingests medical data from diverse sources and normalizes it for both training and inference
Develop workflow orchestration tools to automate complex data processing pipelines
Create CI/CD pipelines for reliable deployment of data transformations and ML models
Refactor and optimize existing PySpark code to enhance performance and scalability
ML Production Infrastructure:
Design and implement real-time inference systems that can handle high-volume prediction requests
Build infrastructure for A/B testing and controlled model rollouts
Develop monitoring tools to track model performance and data drift in production
This role combines data engineering and ML infrastructure expertise to create the backbone of our AI-powered health insurance platform. You'll work across the full ML lifecycle, from initial data processing to production deployment and monitoring.
What We Value
Autonomy and Curiosity:
You’re eager to learn, can work independently, and thrive when given the freedom to solve problems your way.
Judgment and Adaptability:
You’re skilled at prioritizing projects and making sound decisions in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
Collaboration:
You communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical teammates, always keeping the end-user in mind.
Ownership:
You’re ready to own projects end-to-end, from designing architecture to writing clean, maintainable code.
Requirements
3+ years of experience as a backend engineer, data engineer, or software engineer with exposure to data pipelines and large-scale infrastructure.
Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and scalable system design.
Demonstrated ability to design secure, robust, and scalable infrastructure for data and backend systems.
Hands-on experience with big data tools (e.g., Spark) and pipeline orchestration platforms (e.g., Dagster, Airflow, Prefect).
Proficiency in a backend programming language like Python and solid SQL skills for querying and database design.
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and their data services.
Why Join Us?
Be part of a team building industry-changing technology that directly impacts our clients and millions of people.
Work alongside a talented team that thrives on innovation, transparency, and collaboration.
Join a team that pushes each other to excel, supports one another through challenges, and builds each other up to achieve our best work together.
Enjoy competitive medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus a generous vacation policy—work hard, recharge when needed, and come back ready to make an impact.
Process
This is what you can expect when we like your application:
30-minute introductory call
with Karthik (CTO/COO & Co-Founder)
Take-home coding challenge
60-minute review
of your coding challenge with Karthik (virtual)
Onsite interview
at our NYC office (or virtual for remote), including technical and behavioral/cultural components