Principal DevOps Engineer
Helm Health
Software Engineering
United States
USD 180k-225k / year + Equity
Posted on Feb 21, 2026
Principal DevOps Engineer
USA
Engineering
Remote
Full-time
About Helm Health
Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that allows members to see simple upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care.
Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join!
The Role
We're seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to lead our infrastructure and platform engineering function, reporting directly to the CTO. You'll partner with the CTO to define infrastructure strategy and then own its implementation, operations, and ongoing evolution. You'll serve as team lead for our Infrastructure team and bear ultimate responsibility for the reliability, security, and performance of our production systems around the clock.
Team Context
You'll be building the Infrastructure team. Today, infrastructure responsibilities are distributed across the engineering org. You'll consolidate that into a cohesive function, starting with a Senior Backend Engineer as your first direct report, and help guide the team's growth from there. You'll work closely with every engineering team to ensure our platform is reliable, secure, and scalable.
Responsibilities
- Partner with the CTO to define infrastructure strategy and technical direction, then own implementation and day-to-day execution
- Lead and grow the Infrastructure team, starting with one direct report and expanding over time
- Ensure production systems meet stringent availability and performance requirements in a 24/7/365 environment
- Design and operate multi-regional infrastructure and data stores for resilience and low-latency access
- Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, and release management processes
- Manage and scale our cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform, including compute, networking, storage, and managed database services
- Own infrastructure-as-code with Terraform/Terraform Cloud across all environments
- Implement and enforce security, compliance, and operational best practices (HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2)
- Build monitoring, alerting, and observability systems to ensure production reliability
- Manage and optimize database infrastructure across PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery, Bigtable, and Firestore
- Own and lead incident response processes, including on-call rotation
- Collaborate with engineering leadership to plan capacity, manage costs, and align infrastructure investments with business priorities
- Experience with networking fundamentals, including DNS, load balancing, firewalls, VPCs, and service mesh or similar
Requirements
- 8+ years in infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE roles
- Deep expertise with Google Cloud Platform
- Experience building and running multi-regional services and data stores
- Strong Terraform/Terraform Cloud experience — you think in infrastructure-as-code by default
- Extensive experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production
- Hands-on experience managing and scaling relational and NoSQL databases at production scale
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD systems, monitoring/observability stacks, and incident response processes
- Track record of maintaining high-availability production systems with demanding uptime requirements
- Experience leading or mentoring engineers
- Experience with disaster recovery planning and runbook creation
Preferred Qualifications
- Healthcare infrastructure experience — HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST
- Python proficiency
- Incident management tooling (incident.io or similar)
- Cost optimization and FinOps experience on GCP
- Startup experience
Characteristics
- Decisive and opinionated — you have strong views on how infrastructure should be done and can articulate why
- Ownership mentality — you treat the platform as your product
- Mission-driven — motivated by making healthcare simpler and more transparent
- Calm under pressure — you're the person others look to during incidents
- Willing to do both the big-picture architectural work and the unglamorous day-to-day operations
Internal Tools/Technology
- HCP Terraform / Google Cloud Platform
- Cursor / Linear / GitHub / Notion / Whimsical
- Slack / Google Workspace / Zoom
- incident.io / Sentry
- Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — we are an AI-forward engineering team
- macOS / Linux
Compensation
The target base salary range for this position is $180,000 - $225,000 and is part of a competitive total rewards package including equity and benefits. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors, including experience, skills, location, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations.
Benefits/Offerings
- Equity
- Unlimited PTO (mandatory 12 days)
- Computer + home office stipend
- 401(k) + matching
- Health and dental insurance
- Autonomy and tons of room for career growth
Occasional Travel
We meet quarterly as a company.
Please note that this is a fully remote opportunity.
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Req ID: R9