Platform Engineer

BACKGROUND At Yuzu, we’re building the next-generation health insurance company. We are NOT building a digital brokerage or an AI wrapper - we are going deeper to build the foundational infrastructure required to power tomorrow’s health plans. We believe that software can unlock the ability to build health insurance that is affordable, adaptable, and scalable. Yuzu’s platform will be core to this future. So how does this actually work? Over 70% of employer-sponsored health plans are self-funded, meaning the employer acts as the insurer and directly covers employees' healthcare costs. This allows companies to customize benefits, gain flexibility, and save money. Self-funded employers partner with a Third-Party Administrator (TPA) to handle the behind-the-scenes plan administration, like processing claims and managing benefits. The TPA industry is a $500bn sleeper industry that has historically been seen as a services business, bogged down by manual processes and legacy systems (for context, our team couldn’t even access these on our Macs). Yuzu is a vertically integrated & tech-enabled TPA, currently servicing thousands of employees. We differentiate by helping innovative health plans come to life by facilitating new ways to pay for and access healthcare covered by insurance. Yuzu’s goal is to make it as easy for any business to create and manage a custom health plan as it is to create a storefront on Shopify. We’re backed by top VC firms and 10+ unicorn founders, including leaders at Stripe, OpenAI, Brex, Deel, Mercury, and Notion, and we’re building a formidable team to tackle the massive opportunity ahead. ROLE Yuzu’s top priority is to ship good software fast. In the last year, engineering headcount quadrupled and our engineering team mitosed into teams. Platform’s mandate is to continue to make it fast, easy, and safe to build Yuzu. If our claims processing volume (or our commits to source control) grow by 100x, we want our systems—and the way we build and operate them—to scale gracefully. Platform’s customer is the rest of engineering. We are looking for a product-minded engineer who will specialize in platform at Yuzu. You will ship application code, cloud infrastructure, and internal tooling while working closely with the product teams that rely on them. Platform’s mandate is to identify and close gaps in performance, developer experience, and overall quality before they slow Yuzu down. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR Finds the Right Path Different teams often have legitimate but competing needs. You help teams make decisions that hold up as Yuzu grows. Sometimes the right answer is to help one team solve an immediate problem; other times it is to step back and build a shared solution. You can gather input from the right people, make tradeoffs visible, and take responsibility for setting a direction where there is no existing playbook. When you establish a standard, you make it easy to follow without creating friction. Multiplies Other Engineers Platform should give other engineering teams more leverage. You care about safe defaults, clear interfaces and documentation, and meaningful observability. You create simple, understandable systems that other engineering teams can extend. Builds Practical Systems You start from a real bottleneck, build the smallest useful solution, and use evidence to improve it. You avoid both one-off work and premature abstraction. REQUIREMENTS Curious > Experienced Many parts of Yuzu are a niche within a niche (e.g., Cash Pay https://yuzu.health/docs/guides/guide-to-cash-pay). We don’t expect prior experience in our industry or tech stack, and you do not need to have worked on a platform team before. We do care that you are excited to learn about unfamiliar systems, can identify opportunities for impact, and share what you learn with others. AI-Native You use AI to accelerate your own work and are excited to help us discover what high-leverage software engineering looks like today. You care about maintaining consistency and quality as AI increases the pace of change, and you are excited to build CI systems that keep up. Self-Directed We are a small team and we don’t have a dedicated PM. You can comfortably find problems on your own, investigate and solve them, and deliver without persistent external direction. You judge when something should be soloed, escalated, collaborated on, or delegated to a more appropriate owner. EXAMPLE PROJECTS Make High-Quality, Prod-Like Data Accessible How can engineers debug issues in production without accessing PHI? You might work on systems to scrub, synthesize, restore, and develop with that data, finding the right balance of speed and fidelity. Authentication/Authorization Yuzu’s is a flexible platform that plan designers use to build highly-customizable health plans. It takes a village to administer a health plan, so how do we make sure everyone gets exactly the right level of permissions? How do you enforce access controls across complex entity relationships, ensure privacy and audit-ability, and let users self-service team permissions, all while guaranteeing excellent performance for checks that are performed on literally every request? Unify Public API Each product team owns only a subset of external-facing API endpoints. How do we guarantee a consistent experience for customers and a consistent development experience for engineers? BROWNIE POINTS - You’ve been on-call or otherwise responsible for a significant system in production. - You’ve scaled a system from small to large and lived to tell the tale. - You’ve worked on systems with meaningful reliability, security, privacy, payments, or compliance requirements. - You’ve worked at a large organization with cross-team coordination challenges. - You’ve worked at startup where the engineering team grew far beyond the founders. OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU - You will have significant ownership. Both equity and autonomy. - We will invest in your learning and forgive your mistakes along the way. - We will trust you and tell you everything you want to know about the business. COMPENSATION $160k to $240k annual salary, plus a meaningful equity component commensurate with the level of role at a Series A company in NY/SF. PROCESS If we interview you, you can expect the following process - Initial 30 minute conversation - A take-home assignment designed to be similar to on-the-job work - A 45 minute fit interview - An onsite super-day - We may speak with 1-2 references you provide