Principal Engineer (AI-First)

• $200k-$250k base + super
• Build and scale a healthcare platform using AI-first engineering
• Hybrid role

At vital.ly, our engineering scope is broad and complex.

Externally, our proprietary customer platform supports over 14,000 healthcare practitioners. It enables wholesale ordering for clinic dispensaries, advanced prescribing workflows with built-in clinical safety features, and digital prescriptions sent directly to patients for online fulfilment - all powered by Australia’s most comprehensive complementary medicine reference tools.

Internally, the proprietary platform is the backbone of our distribution business, turning prescriptions into deliveries. It provides customised workflows and tools that manage practitioner access, inventory, orders, and reference content as well as protect patient data - making this ecosystem uniquely powerful.

Connecting every part, internal and external APIs ensure seamless integration, while AWS infrastructure delivers security, resilience, and scalability.

As we evolve the platform, we are undertaking a critical transformation of our data architecture — moving from a legacy MySQL schema to a structured, scalable PostgreSQL environment, while embedding AI-first engineering practices into how we build.

Who this role is for:

This role will suit a highly capable principal engineer who thrives in deep technical problem-solving and ownership.

You have strong experience working with complex database systems and understand the realities of maintaining and evolving production data at scale. You’ve been involved in significant data transformations or migrations and understand the importance of sequencing, validation, and rollback planning.

You think in terms of systems, not just features. Data integrity, performance, and long-term maintainability matter to you, and you take a structured approach to solving problems that others may consider too complex or risky.

You are comfortable working independently and taking ownership of a critical workstream. When something isn’t ready, you can clearly explain why — and back that up with sound technical reasoning.

You are also pragmatic about new tools and approaches. You are open to AI-assisted development workflows and understand the importance of validating and reviewing outputs to ensure production quality.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES

Phase 1 (Schema Formalisation & Migration)

• Design and operate agentic AI workflows (tools, prompts, guardrails) to accelerate schema auditing and migration tasks.
• Audit the full MySQL schema, including tables, columns, indexes, implicit relationships, and type/charset/collation inconsistencies.
• Add foreign keys and constraints to a live production database without downtime using Laravel’s migration tooling.
• Resolve data inconsistencies, including orphaned rows, type mismatches, and ambiguous columns, in collaboration with founding engineers.
• Plan and execute the MySQL to PostgreSQL migration end-to-end.
• Document all schema changes with migration files, clear rationale, and rollback plans.
• Coordinate migration sequencing and provide clear, consistent progress reporting to the team.

Phase 2 (Platform Expansion)

• Partner with the Head of Engineering to uphold high standards of data architecture and optimisation across the platform.
• Define and refine AI agent rules, roles, and guardrails to support AI-first engineering practices.
• Review merge requests and authorise production releases.
• Own the search architecture, including tsvector FTS, postGIS and pgvector embeddings.
• Design and build platform features on the migrated architecture.
• Own modules end-to-end across the service layer, APIs, and frontend where required.
• Optimise query performance, define indexing strategies, and guide ongoing data modelling across the platform.
• Shape technical direction and architectural decisions as the product evolves.

REQUIREMENTS

Must haves:

• Experience designing and optimising large, complex database systems.
• Deep knowledge of ACID-compliant databases, including storage engines, locking, transactions, index internals, and collation/character set optimisation/limitations.
• Experience executing large-scale data transformations (millions of rows), including batching, tracking, and safe rollback strategies.
• Architecture-level engineering experience, including API, modular monoliths, and contract-driven design.
• Experience working with AI-assisted or agentic development workflows, including validating and reviewing AI-generated output.
• Production experience with AWS infrastructure and services, including ECS, RDS, CloudFront, Secrets Manager, EC2, and CloudWatch.
• Experience in healthcare or other regulated environments.
• This is a permanent, full-time role and requires unrestricted and ongoing work rights in Australia.

Nice to have:

• Experience with CDC processes and MySQL binlog-based replication or change data capture mechanisms.
• Experience working with pgvector for embedding storage and similarity search.
• Experience optimising PostgreSQL full-text search using tsvector and related indexing strategies.

About vital.ly

vital.ly is the infrastructure behind sustainable clinical practice. Trusted by over 14,000 practitioners across Australia, vital.ly integrates three pillars of infrastructure — technology platform, distribution capability, and practitioner expertise — to transform how clinics prescribe and dispense complementary medicines.

Through vital.ly, practitioners can access wholesale ordering from leading brands, dispense prescriptions digitally, and use advanced prescribing tools with built-in clinical safety tools. Every order is fulfilled through our own dedicated warehouse, with fulfilment operations designed for speed, accuracy, and scale. Behind it all is a team of qualified practitioners and experienced professionals who provide the support and guidance needed to practice with confidence.

Joining vital.ly means becoming part of a business that empowers practitioners, improves patient outcomes, and drives innovation in complementary medicine.

*Please no recruiters and agencies. We are filling this role in-house.*