Staff Software Engineer, Growth

The Role

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Referrals team and help us build a unified Incentive Platform. The domain that tracks eligibility, entitlement, and fulfillment state for incentive rewards. Our team owns and operates this platform: the system of record for what a member is owed and when.

This is a high-ownership, systems-first role within the team. You'll set technical direction for a platform that's mid-consolidation. Carving a clean domain boundary out of an existing service, closing known correctness gaps, and negotiating the contracts that other teams build against. You'll work closely with product and data science, and have a direct line to business outcomes like referral conversion and cost-per-acquisition.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical direction for the Incentive Platform. Carve a dedicated domain out of its current home, with enforced boundaries and a facade other services call instead of reaching into internals.

• Generalize eligibility and entitlement logic into real, owned APIs, replacing duplicated caps and ad hoc scripts with a single source of truth for what a member has earned and is owed.

• Run production data migrations. Dual-write, backfill, cutover on a system with financial and compliance stakes, where correctness during the transition matters as much as the end state.

• Negotiate and build the technical contract with Fulfillment: idempotent order creation, failure handling, real-time inventory, and reserve/release semantics. You're the technical counterparty other teams negotiate with, not just an implementer of their asks.

• Find and close correctness gaps in the current system. Places where real dollar-value entitlements are miscounted, under-specified, or rely on an undocumented assumption.

• Partner with product, design, and analytics to define what to build and why, balancing short-term wins with long-term platform leverage.

• Raise the engineering bar by driving code quality, system design standards, observability, and technical decision-making on the team.

• Mentor engineers on the team, growing their judgment on architecture and cross-team tradeoffs over time.

• Participate in the team’s weekly on-call rotation, helping ensure the reliability and timely support of the systems we build.

What We’re Looking For

• Domain modeling under legacy constraints - You've carved a bounded context out of a service with accreted responsibilities, without a rewrite, while it kept shipping.

• Production migration experience - You've run a dual-write/backfill/cutover on a real data model, ideally with financial or compliance stakes where getting it wrong is expensive.

• Full-stack depth - Strong skills across technologies such as React, React Native, TypeScript, NestJS, GraphQL, Node.js, relational and non-relational databases, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and Redis. We don’t expect a perfect match on every technology, but you should be fluent in most.

• Staff-level leadership - You’ve set technical direction for a team, influenced cross-functional roadmaps, and made architectural decisions that have held up over time.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree (or foreign equivalent) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time working on production systems at scale.

• Hands-on experience building and operating full-stack applications (for example, using React/React Native on the frontend and Node.js/TypeScript or similar on the backend).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing or evolving incentive, rewards, ledger, or entitlement systems that carry real financial or compliance stakes.

• Experience running a production data migration (dual-write, backfill, cutover) without a maintenance window, on a system where correctness during the transition mattered.

• Experience negotiating or owning a service contract with another engineering team — API design as a cross-team negotiation, not just an internal interface.

• Proven experience setting technical direction for a team, owning architectural decisions, and driving high-quality execution in partnership with product and data science.

• Proven experience setting technical direction for a team, owning architectural decisions, and driving high-quality execution in partnership with product and data science.

• Prior work at a consumer growth-focused company (for example, e-commerce, marketplaces, or consumer apps) and/or experience with viral or referral growth mechanics.

• Experience working in healthcare or other regulated-data environments.

Why This Role

• High ownership, low bureaucracy — this team moves quickly and ships iteratively while maintaining high technical standards.

• Direct, measurable impact — your work has a clear line of sight to how many people access MSK care through Hinge Health.

• Greenfield technical challenges — including scaling referral infrastructure, integrating personalization, and evolving experimentation capabilities as member volume grows.

• Deep collaboration — you’ll work closely with strong data science, product, and marketing partners who are embedded with the team.

Hinge Health Hybrid Model

We believe that remote work and in-person work have their own advantages and disadvantages, and we want to be able to leverage the best of both worlds. Employees in hybrid roles are required to be in the office 3 days per week, for the full 8 hours of a typical business day. The San Francisco office has a dog-friendly workplace program.

About Hinge Health

At Hinge Health, we’re using technology to scale and automate the delivery of healthcare, starting with musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, which affect over 1.7 billion people worldwide. Our AI-powered, human-centered care model spans MSK, pelvic health, gastrointestinal (GI) and migraine care. With over 60 partnerships with health plans, PBMs and other ecosystem partners, Hinge Health is available to over 25 million people across more than 2,900 employers. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Montreal and Bangalore. Learn more at hingehealth.com.

What You’ll Love About Us

• Inclusive healthcare and benefits: On top of comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, we offer employees and their family members help with gender-affirming care, tools for family and fertility planning, and travel reimbursements if healthcare isn’t available where you live.

• Planning for the future: Start saving for the future with our traditional or Roth 401k retirement plan options which include a 2% company match.

• Modern life stipends: Manage your own learning and development.

• Grow with us: Grow with us through discounted company stock through our ESPP with easy payroll deductions.

Culture & Engagement

Hinge Health is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We make employment decisions without regards to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, veteran status, disability status, pregnancy, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you feel you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, let us know by reaching out to your recruiter.

By submitting your application you are acknowledging we are using your personal data as outlined in the personnel and candidate privacy policy.

Beware of Phishing Attempts: We've noticed an increase in phishing where fraudsters impersonate employees and send fake job offers to steal sensitive information. We'll never ask for financial details during the hiring process and only use "@hingehealth.com" emails. If you receive a suspicious offer, stop communication and report it to the US FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. To verify an email from our recruiting team, forward it to security@hingehealth.com.

This Staff Software Engineer role focuses on evolving Hinge Health’s referral incentives platform into a reliable system for eligibility, entitlements, and reward fulfillment. You’ll guide its architecture and migration, work across engineering and product partners, and connect platform decisions to referral growth outcomes.

Role at a glance

Skills mentioned

What you will likely work on

• Separate incentive capabilities from a legacy service and establish clear boundaries for other services to use.
• Build centralized APIs for eligibility and entitlements, replacing duplicated rules and scripts.
• Plan and run production migrations using dual writes, backfills, and cutovers while protecting data correctness.
• Define fulfillment-service contracts for order creation, error handling, inventory, and reserve/release flows.
• Investigate and fix errors or assumptions affecting member reward entitlements.
• Partner with product, design, analytics, and data science to shape platform work and balance near-term outcomes with long-term needs.
• Set technical direction and engineering practices, including system design, code quality, observability, and technical decisions.
• Mentor engineers and participate in the team’s weekly on-call rotation.

Good fit signals

• You have 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including production systems at scale.
• You have hands-on experience building and operating full-stack applications; the posting does not expect a perfect match across every listed technology.
• You have led technical direction and architectural decisions and influenced cross-functional roadmaps.
• Experience with real-world data migrations or service contracts negotiated across engineering teams is useful; related migration and contract experience is preferred.
• Incentive, rewards, ledger, referral-growth, consumer-app, healthcare, or regulated-data experience can be helpful, but is preferred rather than a universal requirement.