Collate is an AI document generation platform for life sciences. We automate paperwork with AI, helping our customers get life-saving innovations to patients years faster. Collate is an end-to-end solution, powering every step of drug, diagnostic, and medical device development—from concept to market.
Our CEO Surbhi Sarna is a former General Partner at Y Combinator. Surbhi founded nVision Medical, which developed a new method to detect ovarian cancer and was acquired by Boston Scientific. Our CTO Nate Smith is a former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and founder of Lever. Our AI researchers, engineers, and designers have worked at Google, Nvidia, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, AirBnB, Hippocratic AI, and Grail, and 40% of our team are former founders.
We’re an elite team, with $125M in funding from top investors (Redpoint, First Round Capital, CRV, Conviction, Y Combinator) and leaders in healthcare and AI. This is a rare chance to join an early-stage company with world-changing potential, experienced founders, and resources to execute at scale.
We’re looking for a Full-Stack Engineer (Backend-leaning) to design and build the systems and user-facing features that power Collate. You’ll spend most of your time on backend challenges—APIs, services, and infrastructure—but you’ll also ship end-to-end features.
This is an opportunity to help define our technical foundation, collaborate directly with design and product, and shape how our users experience Collate from day one.
Collate uses a modern tech stack, targeting a highly reliable and available platform. We use Go for scalable backend services, TypeScript & React for frontend development, and Python for AI & ML services. Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS with Kubernetes for orchestration and Terraform + Argo CD for configuration management. Key systems include S3, PostgreSQL, Kafka, OpenSearch, LLMs, and other AI models.
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Design and scale backend services, APIs, and data pipelines that power Collate’s products.
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Deliver end-to-end, production-ready features in partnership with product, design, and AI engineering.
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Balance iteration speed with technical rigor to ensure systems scale reliably.
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Create internal tools and workflows that accelerate engineering productivity.
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Share responsibility for production systems, including participating in on-call rotation.
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Have experience building across the stack, with deeper strength in backend systems.
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Enjoy taking features from idea → backend architecture → polished UI.
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Care deeply about both technical robustness and the end user experience.
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Are motivated by ambiguity, eager to pick up missing knowledge, and excited to solve novel problems.
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Value speed, pragmatism, and scrappiness but know when to design for robustness.
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Have been an early-stage engineer or startup founder—or aspire to work at that level of ownership.
Impact: Build systems and experiences that touch real patients and providers, improving healthcare outcomes.
Ownership: Shape both our product experience and our engineering culture from the start.
Learning: Collaborate with a uniquely interdisciplinary team—AI researchers, healthcare leaders, and experienced startup builders.
Upside: Join a company early enough to have meaningful equity and career-defining impact.
The base salary range for this role is $150,000–$300,000 USD annually, depending on experience and level (Tier 1, San Francisco)