Senior Backend Engineer
Sword Health is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for a remote role open to applicants in Portugal. It pays €50k-€79k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Sword Health.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
- This is listed as a remote role.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Sword Health has 60 other open roles on Level.
- Posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
At Sword, we’re building AI to heal billions and unlock humanity’s full potential. In doing so, we’re pioneering AI Care, a fundamentally new approach to healthcare built for medical reasoning, safety, and real-time treatment, not generic technology applied after the fact. As both a clinical-centric frontier AI lab and an applied AI platform, Sword is reimagining how care is delivered at scale, removing traditional barriers like appointments, waiting rooms, and stigma so more people can access the care they need—and ultimately get back to lives lived in full.
Since 2020, Sword has expanded across physical therapy, women’s health, cardiometabolic, and mental health, and is now moving beyond the session to a fully AI-native, 24/7 care program that brings physical activity, therapeutic exercise, psychotherapy, nutrition, and behavior change into one connected experience. More than 700,000 members across three continents have completed over 10 million AI sessions, helping 1,000+ enterprise clients avoid more than $1 billion in unnecessary healthcare costs. Backed by 42 clinical studies, 44+ patents, and more than $500 million raised from leading investors including Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Founders Fund, Sword is defining a new standard for healthcare.
AI Proficiency at Sword
AI fluency is a core expectation at Sword. Every candidate is assessed against our three-level framework — be ready to share real examples of how AI is already part of how you work.
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Explorer (Level 1) — Uses AI daily to boost personal productivity
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Builder (Level 2) — Creates workflows and tools that elevate the whole team
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Integrator (Level 3) — Embeds AI into products and processes at scale
Every hire must demonstrate at least Level 1. The expected level will vary depending on the seniority of the role.
How we work (and who thrives here):
- Ownership and accountability: you own outcomes, not just tasks. When something you built breaks or doesn’t deliver value, it’s yours to fix, and you don’t wait to be asked;
- Sense of urgency: you move fast, make decisions with incomplete information, and prefer shipping and learning over polishing in isolation;
- Speed over scalability: we optimize for speed of delivery, go-to-market and product-market fit, not for scale we don’t need yet. You default to the fastest path to a working experiment;
- Doing things right where it counts: speed doesn’t mean carelessness. You know which corners are safe to cut today and which ones would slow us down tomorrow, and you keep quality and reliability where they matter, especially in a clinical context;
- Experiment mindset: you treat features as hypotheses, build small, measure, and are comfortable throwing work away if it doesn’t prove value;
- AI-native way of working: you use AI tools and coding agents daily to multiply your output, and you look for ways to automate your own work and the team’s;
- Going beyond your role: you don’t stop at “my part is done”. You help product, design and clinical teammates get unblocked so that our product projects are successfully closed, not just handed off;
- Clear, direct communication: you flag risks early, explain trade-offs in plain language to non-technical colleagues, and keep everyone aligned without heavy process.
What you’ll be doing:
- Stay up to speed with all web technologies, software architecture principles and design patterns;
- Understanding the current lifestyle and development of new lifecycles with emphasis on software quality processes;
- Actively participate in the training and building skills of other web developers;
- Continuous monitoring of performance on production environments;
- Create and run load tests, and analyze applications’ performance;
- Develop our professional web-based app with an emphasis on rich interaction and responsive design;
- Develop analytics dashboards and web data visualization tools;
- Work closely with our clinical team to determine the ideal workflow of the system from the user’s perspective.
What you need to have:
- Extensive experience (5+ years of experience) with web development (experience with Golang or/and NodeJS are mandatory);
- Knowledge of SQL language and managing SQL databases (experience in NoSQL databases a plus);
- Ability to write high-performance, reusable code;
- Knowledge of Software Engineering patterns with special focus on Web Services development;
- Knowledge of caching software like Memcached or Redis are a plus;
- Knowledge of continuous integration / deployment process and tools;
- Excellent communication skills, problem solving and proactive attitude;
- Good level of written and technical English;
- You should know how to design and implement AI-powered workflows or automations that meaningfully improve efficiency and outcomes;
- AI coding agents experience is required;
- Spec driven development is valued;
- Proficiente coding agent usage is valued.
*The range below reflects base, variable, and equity for this role.
This is a starting point, not a ceiling — once someone joins and proves they're outlier talent, we adjust quickly to make sure their compensation matches their impact.
Job titles may span more than one career level, so actual pay depends on skills, qualifications, experience, location, and market demand, among other factors. The range reflects base salary plus any variable, bonus, or sales incentives, and our estimate of the value of private company stock options where applicable. It's subject to change, and future stock value isn't guaranteed. Sword also offers additional benefits beyond total compensation.
Total Compensation Range€50.400—€79.200 EUR Country-specific benefits may vary and will be detailed separately. Sword Health complies with applicable Federal and State civil rights laws and does not discriminate on the basis of Age, Ancestry, Color, Citizenship, Gender, Gender expression, Gender identity, Gender information, Marital status, Medical condition, National origin, Physical or mental disability, Pregnancy, Race, Religion, Caste, Sexual orientation, and Veteran status.How we rate this
Senior Backend Engineer at Sword Health rates 10 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
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