The Leidos Health and Services Sector Chief Product Office has an opening for a Backend Software Engineer to support the Health Data Extraction (HDE) product effort.
The successful candidate will design, develop, test, and maintain cloud-based backend services that process healthcare documents and data. This role combines strong software engineering skills with practical experience integrating artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and document-processing capabilities into production applications.
The engineer will work within a cross-functional product team to transform structured and unstructured healthcare information into reliable, standards-based data products. This is primarily a software engineering and product development role, rather than a research-focused data science position.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Design, develop, test, and maintain backend services, APIs, and data-processing workflows supporting the HDE product.
- Develop production-quality Python software for document ingestion, processing, clinical data extraction, validation, enrichment, and delivery.
- Integrate generative AI, NLP, OCR, and other machine-learning services into secure and reliable backend applications.
- Convert product requirements, technical specifications, and data contracts into maintainable software components.
- Build and support RESTful APIs and event-driven processing workflows.
- Process structured and unstructured healthcare data and produce consistent, standards-based outputs.
- Implement automated unit, integration, and regression tests to protect product quality and prevent defects.
- Diagnose and resolve software, data, performance, and integration issues across distributed cloud services.
- Improve application reliability through structured logging, monitoring, error handling, retries, and operational metrics.
- Evaluate AI-assisted extraction results and help implement validation, grounding, confidence scoring, and quality-control mechanisms.
- Optimize services for performance, scalability, resilience, and cost.
- Protect sensitive healthcare information by following applicable security, privacy, and data-handling requirements.
- Participate in design discussions, code reviews, estimation, sprint planning, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Work independently on moderately complex assignments while coordinating with software engineers, AI/ML engineers, data engineers, product managers, and domain specialists.
- Contribute to technical documentation, engineering standards, and continuous improvement of the development process.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical discipline, with 4+ years of relevant professional experience. Additional experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
- Professional software development experience using Python or a comparable backend programming language.
- Experience developing and supporting production backend services, APIs, or data-processing applications.
- Understanding of object-oriented and modular software design, data structures, error handling, and maintainable coding practices.
- Experience with REST APIs, JSON-based data contracts, and asynchronous or event-driven processing.
- Experience working with relational databases and SQL.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms and managed services, preferably AWS.
- Experience integrating AI/ML models or managed AI services into software applications.
- Working knowledge of NLP, document processing, generative AI, or information-extraction concepts.
- Experience writing automated tests and troubleshooting software across development and deployed environments.
- Experience using Git and participating in collaborative development and code-review workflows.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
- Effective written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work with technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
- Ability to independently complete assigned features and contribute to the design of moderately complex software components.
- Ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance or Public Trust/suitability determination, as required by the program.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience developing serverless or cloud-native applications using AWS services such as Lambda, Step Functions, SQS, S3, API Gateway, RDS/PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, Bedrock, or Textract.
- Experience working with healthcare records, clinical documents, or protected health information.
- Familiarity with healthcare interoperability standards such as FHIR or HL7.
- Experience building document-processing, OCR, NLP, or generative-AI extraction pipelines.
- Experience evaluating AI-generated results for accuracy, traceability, grounding, and reliability.
- Familiarity with responsible AI practices, including human review, auditability, data protection, and model-output validation.
- Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform, and automated CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with PostgreSQL, distributed workflows, message queues, and asynchronous processing.
- Familiarity with containerized development using Docker.
- Prior professional services, healthcare, government, or federal consulting experience.
- Understanding of Domain-Driven Design, specification-driven development, and test-driven development.
- Demonstrated curiosity and willingness to learn and apply new technologies, frameworks, and engineering practices.
If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo - because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 - and moving faster than anyone else dares.
Original Posting:October 16, 2026
For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.
Pay Range:Pay Range $87,100.00 - $157,450.00
The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.
