Careers at Cenva Labs
Senior Software Engineer / Technical Lead
Join a small, high-trust team building production healthcare systems that directly impact patient care. This is a hands-on leadership role with real ownership, clear trajectory, and meaningful technical scope.
Position Overview
| Title | Senior Software Engineer / Technical Lead |
|---|---|
| Department | Engineering |
| Reports To | Allen Nikka (Founder, Cenva Labs) |
| Classification | Exempt, Full-Time (W-2) |
| Location | Remote (US-based, West Coast or Central time zone required) |
| Salary Range | $130,000 - $150,000/year |
| Benefits | Health/Dental/Vision (50% covered), 401(k), Unlimited PTO |
Version 1.0 · Last updated: March 2026
About Cenva Labs
Cenva Labs is a healthcare-focused software engineering firm based in Los Angeles. We build and maintain technical infrastructure for healthcare organizations, with a primary focus on our anchor client, a concierge primary care practice serving employer groups across multiple states.
We are a small, high-trust team where engineers have real ownership over systems that directly affect patient care. No layers of middle management, no Jira ticket factories.
Our mission: Build software and businesses that people love.
Honesty
We communicate openly, directly, and with integrity.
Diligence
We take pride in doing the work well, from first principles to finished product.
Autonomy
We trust our people to take ownership, make decisions, and push ideas forward.
The Role
We are looking for a senior engineer who can serve as the day-to-day technical lead for our healthcare client engagement. This is a player-coach role: you will write code, review code, ship features, and guide a junior engineer while owning reliability and technical direction.
This is not a manage-from-a-distance role. You will be hands-on in the codebase every day while taking increasing ownership of client communication and team leadership over time.
Why this role exists: We are building bench strength, reducing single-point-of-failure risk, and giving our client a dedicated senior technical leader. This is a path to running the technical operation for a growing healthcare company, not a cog-in-the-machine role.
What You Will Work On
Core Technical Work (70%)
- Cloud Infrastructure (AWS): Maintain and extend serverless and containerized infrastructure on AWS (Lambda, ECS, S3, RDS, SQS, CloudWatch). You should be comfortable owning the full deployment lifecycle.
- Full-Stack Application Development: Build and maintain applications using TypeScript/Node.js on the backend and React on the frontend. Our infrastructure framework is SST (Serverless Stack) on AWS.
- Healthcare Integrations: Build and maintain integrations with EHR systems, scheduling platforms, lab systems, and third-party healthcare APIs. This is messy, real-world integration work, not clean REST APIs.
- Data Pipelines and Automation: Design and maintain data flows for everything from patient eligibility, claims data, census collection, and care gap identification.
- Reliability and Monitoring: Own the health of production systems. Build and extend our alerting, handle incidents, and improve observability.
Leadership and Mentorship (30%)
- Guide Junior Engineers: Provide code reviews, pair programming, and technical mentorship to our current junior engineer. Help them grow.
- Technical Decision-Making: Own architecture decisions for new features and system improvements. You will have a strong voice in what we build and how, and work directly with founders, and both clinical and operational leadership.
- Partner Communication: Participate in operational calls with partners, translate clinical and operational needs into technical solutions, and communicate progress clearly.
- Process Improvement: Have an ownership role in continuing to shape the engineering practices that work for a small team: lightweight CI/CD, testing strategies, documentation, deployment procedures.
What We Are Looking For
Required
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time as a senior or lead engineer.
- Strong AWS experience - you have built and maintained production infrastructure on AWS, not just used it in tutorials. Lambda, ECS, RDS, S3, IAM are familiar territory.
- Full-stack TypeScript/JavaScript proficiency across Node.js backends and React frontends.
- Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL strongly preferred).
- Integration experience with APIs, webhooks, and real-world third-party data complexity.
- Comfortable working autonomously in a small team.
- Strong written communication for remote-first collaboration.
- US-based, available during West Coast or Central business hours.
Strongly Preferred
- Healthcare industry experience with healthcare data, HIPAA requirements, or healthcare SaaS.
- HIPAA compliance familiarity (we will provide HIPAA training regardless).
- Experience with EHR/EMR integrations (Elation, Epic, Cerner, Athena, or similar).
- SST (Serverless Stack) or similar IaC frameworks (Terraform, CDK, Pulumi).
- Experience mentoring junior engineers.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with healthcare billing, claims, or eligibility workflows.
- Experience in a small team or startup environment (< 10 people).
- Background in regulated industries (healthcare, fintech, etc.).
What We Offer
Compensation
- $130,000 - $150,000 base salary (based on experience and location)
- Bi-annual performance reviews with 1-5% merit-based raises
- Paid biweekly
Benefits
- Health, Dental, and Vision insurance (50% employer-covered)
- 401(k) plan
- Unlimited PTO (coordinated with your manager)
- US federal holidays observed
The Intangibles
- Ownership, not tickets. You will own systems end-to-end, not get assigned Jira stories. Your judgment matters here.
- Stability in the age of AI. We use AI tools to move faster, but value engineers who understand systems deeply. Healthcare software requires human judgment and compliance awareness.
- Growth trajectory. This role is designed to evolve with a growing organization. As you take ownership, your scope and influence grow.
- Mission that matters. The systems you build directly enable better patient outcomes.
- Small team, high trust. No bureaucracy, no politics. A small team of people who care about doing good work.
Hiring Process
Application / Intro - Resume + brief cover note on why this role interests you.
Screening Call (30 min) - Culture fit, background, and mutual Q&A with Allen.
Paid Technical Assessment (async, ~6 hours) - A practical take-home that reflects real work, not LeetCode. We compensate you for your time regardless of outcome.
Technical Deep Dive (60 min) - Walk through your assessment, discuss architecture, and talk through real scenarios.
Final Conversation (30 min) - Remaining questions, logistics, and offer discussion.
Timeline: We generally aim to move through this process in about 2 weeks.
How to Apply
Send your resume and a brief note to careers@cenvalabs.com with the subject line: Senior SWE / Tech Lead Application.
In your note, tell us:
- Why this role interests you (2-3 sentences is fine)
- Your experience with AWS and healthcare (if any)
- Your timezone and availability
And include a resume (and, even better, a link to your Github profile - we care more about what you've built). We review every application personally. No AI screening, no keyword filters.
Equal Opportunity
Cenva Labs is committed to providing equal employment opportunities without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, or any other protected status.
Questions? Reach out to careers@cenvalabs.com.