Senior Systems Engineer (Rust / PostgreSQL)

TL;DR: High-quality systems programming in a startup with unambiguous benefit to society.

About Firemetrics

Firemetrics gives hospitals and other healthcare providers the ability to regain ownership and sovereignty over the data in their systems.

COVID-19 was a wake-up call for many institutions: even a basic question like "How many oxygen machines are available?" was near-impossible to answer in real time for most hospitals. Data is siloed in a dozen or more systems, jealously guarded and walled off by the system manufacturers, making holistic analysis and management very difficult. The transfer of data – for example from the lab to the hospital information system – is often manual and therefore error-prone, which leads to dangerous situations every day.

In this landscape, the open FHIR standard (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is quickly becoming the lingua franca of cross-system exchange, aided by legislation in Europe and the USA that forces manufacturers to open up their systems. Once all systems speak the same language, this information can be collected in a clinical data repository (CDR), giving applications a single source of truth to interact with.

Firemetrics is a spin-off of the University Hospital Essen, building a best-in-class CDR with ambitious performance and reliability goals.

The Role

As a Software Engineer focused on our core technology, you will work on:

• a custom PostgreSQL extension written in Rust
• a FHIR server written in Rust

This involves low-level systems programming, distributed systems design, and performance optimization of both SQL and low-level code.

You will be part of a high-trust team in a dynamic startup in an emerging and exciting domain. Company growth and a fast-moving domain require you to find – and clearly communicate – the right balance between sticking to planned work and reacting to changed circumstances. The role also involves direct communication with partners and customers.

Your Profile

Must have

• 8+ years of professional systems programming experience
• Experience with Rust, or very strong C++ knowledge and the desire to learn Rust
• Experience building and testing reliable applications with complex build systems
• Operational experience with distributed systems
• Excellent technical and non-technical communication skills
• A desire to grow your soft and hard skills

Nice to have

• Open-source contributions
• Experience with healthcare systems and FHIR
• Kubernetes experience
• SQL experience
• Operational experience with PostgreSQL
• You've built a PostgreSQL extension before
• German language skills
• Experience working directly with B2B customers