Software Engineer

About Sandbar

Sandbar Health is building a new health plan and concierge care platform that makes healthcare an enjoyable consumer experience.

For too long, insurance and provider incentives have been misaligned, and no policy or market structure has solved that for the American public. We're changing it by designing an integrated health assurance system that does better when members stay healthy and invests in their long term health. The result will feel less like the healthcare people know today and more like the delightful consumer experience we expect from every other industry.

To achieve our mission, we're building a level-funded health plan for employers, paired with primary care clinics and a full-stack technology platform that serves as the front door to healthcare.

We're a seed-stage startup funded entirely by Route 66 Ventures as their flagship bet on improving US healthcare, and we're building out our core team now. It's a chance to get in on the ground floor of a company positioned to radically change how healthcare works, and to accelerate your career alongside excellent founders, operators, and investors with deep experience across healthcare and technology.

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About the role

You would work alongside the founders to take the product from 0 to 1. We're looking for experienced engineers to work in a founding engineer capacity to create a delightful products built on top of scalable, compliant systems.

We are staffing the role through various contractors of different specialties (See below). To launch our product, we need front end, back end, systems and compliance, and applied AI expertise. If you have a multidisciplinary skillset that covers several of these categories, we'd love to talk, but we are also open to hire for a single specialty.

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Responsibilities

• Own a product area end to end. Take a meaningful slice of the product from idea to production and keep owning it — design it, build it, ship it, and improve it in the real world, working directly with the founders.
• Build things people actually want to use. Create member and broker experiences that remove friction from the healthcare system, on top of services and infrastructure that stay scalable, secure, performant, and compliant.
• Make the hard calls under constraints. Move fast without sacrificing correctness, and weigh user experience against technical and regulatory limits — the stakes are higher when you're handling patient data.
• Set the foundation. Establish the architecture, patterns, and engineering habits an early team will build on for years.
• Ship and stand behind it. Own the reliability, debugging, and iteration of what you put into production.

We keep process light and run on trust, high agency, and craftsmanship. We'd rather you own outcomes than wait to be told what to do.

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Example Projects

• Member app that serves as the front door to everything healthcare related
• Concierge AI agents to guide members through their healthcare experience (Scheduling, triage, preventive health and wellness, understanding benefits, etc.)
• Member experience: integrating the physical concierge primary care experience with a delightful digital experience
• Systems architecture and HIPAA compliance: Integrating our electronic medical record, clinical workflows, and core insurance platform into the member app
• AI broker tooling that delivers a best in class experience for the broker workflow, attracting them to work with Sandbar
• Building out our core insurance platform

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Roles we're hiring for

We're staffing this across the four areas named above. Tell us which fits you best, and if you're more of a full-stack engineer who can cover several, even better.

Frontend. You'd build the member-facing experience: the app and web interfaces that patients and members use day to day. We're looking for strong skills in a modern frontend framework (React/TypeScript or similar), a good eye for interfaces that are usable, accessible, and fast, and comfort working against APIs.

Backend. You'd build the core services and APIs behind the product: the data models, the integrations, and the logic that ties care coordination together. We're looking for solid backend fundamentals, good API and data design, and a track record of taking services to production. Experience wiring LLM APIs into real features is a plus.

Systems & compliance (HIPAA, architecture). You'd own the parts that make the system safe and solid to run on real patient data: cloud architecture, infrastructure, security posture, access control, audit logging, and the groundwork for HIPAA and SOC 2. We're looking for strength with a major cloud (AWS preferred), infrastructure-as-code, and security and compliance practices in regulated settings.

Applied AI. You'd build the AI features that make the product smarter: LLM-powered workflows, retrieval, and agents that take real work off the plates of members and the clinical team. We're looking for someone who can take an idea from a rough prototype to a reliable production feature, experiments quickly with new models and techniques, and has a feel for where models can be trusted and where they need guardrails. Experience designing evals or otherwise measuring AI quality is a real plus, especially since "correct" in healthcare isn't always black and white.

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What we're looking for

• You've built and scaled production systems end to end, and can point to ones you owned.
• You can turn fuzzy user and business problems into clear technical designs, and make sound tradeoffs between user experience, technical constraints, and regulatory constraints.
• You operate well as a founding engineer: high agency, comfortable taking something from 0 to 1 with little scaffolding.
• You have real product judgment — you can tell the difference between "it works" and "it's actually good to use."
• You communicate clearly and directly, in writing and with non-engineers, and work well async on a small team.

We engage contractors across these roles and levels. What matters most is the scope you've owned, the impact you've had, and how you make decisions.

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Experience that stands out

• You've built software in a regulated industry before (healthcare, finance, defense, or similar) and you treat compliance and security as part of the craft. Direct HIPAA or SOC 2 experience, or familiarity with claims or clinical data, is a plus.
• You've been a founder or founding engineer, and know how to balance craft, ownership, and speed.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or AI agents — eval frameworks, RAG, or prompt engineering.
• You can credibly cover more than one of the areas above.

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Compensation & engagement

• Hourly rate of $90–160/hour, depending on role, experience, and location.
• Contract, part-time to start, with room to grow as the work does.
• Ongoing rather than a one-off project; potential to convert to full-time later for the right person.
• Remote. We're based in the DC area and slightly prefer people who can overlap with US East Coast hours, but we're open to both US-based and international contractors.

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How to Apply

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