Contractor Staff Software Engineer

Responsibilities:

Architectural Leadership: Lead the design and architectural direction of complex, distributed systems that balance current business objectives with long-term scalability, resiliency, and extensibility.

Technical Vision: Provide strategic technical leadership, ensuring teams understand the architectural vision, its connection to business value, and the rationale behind design decisions.

Code Excellence: Develop high-quality, maintainable, and efficient code, exemplifying best practices and standards. Set a standard of technical excellence that inspires others to elevate their craftsmanship.

Technical Documentation: Produce clear, comprehensive documentation and architectural diagrams, enabling engineers to understand and implement your designs effectively.

Innovation and Research: Continuously investigate emerging technologies, methodologies, and patterns. Introduce and champion promising innovations that enhance system architecture, scalability, performance, and the overall engineering ecosystem.

Best Practices Enforcement: Establish and enforce coding standards, architectural guidelines, and operational best practices across engineering teams, driving uniformity and clarity in technical direction.

System Development: Architect and implement scalable, high-performance, cloud-native systems for mission-critical applications, ensuring they are robust, reliable, and equipped to scale with business needs.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product management, operations, QA, security, and executive leadership to inform decisions, align priorities, and ensure consistent delivery of high-quality solutions.

System Optimization: Lead proactive performance tuning, capacity planning, and troubleshooting efforts. Continuously seek ways to optimize the reliability, responsiveness, and efficiency of our systems.

Team Mentorship: Foster growth within the engineering organization by mentoring less-experienced engineers, facilitating knowledge sharing, and creating pathways for professional development.

DevOps Integration: Advocate for DevOps principles integrating CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and alerting to deliver features more reliably and frequently, improving both velocity and system stability.

Influence and Change Agency: Demonstrate a track record of successfully advocating for and implementing new technologies or processes. Consistently influence peers and leaders to embrace enhancements that drive better outcomes, ensuring these changes are met with buy-in and long-term adoption.

Skills & Experience:

Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Experience: 15+ years of professional software development experience with a strong focus on large-scale, distributed systems design, architecture, and implementation.

Database Expertise: At least 5 years of experience in database architecture and design, spanning relational databases, NoSQL, Redis, and other storage technologies along with the ability to choose the right tool for the job.

Systems Architecture: Proven history of architecting highly available, performant systems from the ground up. Demonstrates a deep toolkit of architectural patterns, tools, and methods to address various challenges.

Cloud Proficiency: In-depth familiarity with cloud architectures (especially AWS), leveraging services and cloud-native patterns to build scalable, cost-effective, and secure solutions. AWS certifications are a plus.

Performance Optimization: Expert knowledge of system performance tuning, scalability, caching strategies, and cloud-native design patterns that ensure systems meet evolving demand without sacrificing reliability.

API and Microservices: Extensive experience designing clear, maintainable APIs and decomposing monoliths into microservices, ensuring services are loosely coupled and aligned with business domains.

Quality Assurance: Proficiency with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices, ensuring that quality is baked into the development lifecycle.

Leadership Skills: Proven experience leading cross-functional projects and influencing without direct authority. Adept at communicating complex technical concepts to executive leadership, peers, and direct reports.

Change Advocacy: A track record of identifying opportunities for technological or process improvement, influencing stakeholders, and successfully driving meaningful change within engineering organizations.

Analytical Mindset: Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities with a data-driven, objective approach to decision-making.

Communication Skills: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, able to articulate complex solutions in a manner that resonates with diverse audiences and fosters alignment.

Ownership: Demonstrated sense of ownership, initiative, and accountability. Ability to drive projects and changes from conception through successful implementation across multiple teams.

Challenges & Opportunities

Strategic Impact: Collaborate with executive leadership to define, advocate for, and execute high-impact, strategic initiatives that shape the future of healthcare technology.

Innovative Solutions: Lead architecture and design efforts that address complex, end-to-end scenarios from user experience through backend services to data platforms building forward-looking, scalable, and secure solutions.

Technical Innovation: Utilize cutting-edge AWS technologies, advanced data modeling techniques, and industry best practices to solve problems at scale, always seeking opportunities to introduce newer, more effective technologies.

Leadership and Influence: Act as a trusted technical advisor who not only mentors and guides engineers, but also influences peers, stakeholders, and executive teams. Use strong communication skills to establish credibility, gain alignment, and inspire support for proposed changes and architectural decisions.

DevOps Culture: Promote and embody a DevOps-centric mindset, integrating development and operations for faster, more reliable deliveries while encouraging continuous improvement and operational excellence.

Change Agency: Identify opportunities to question existing patterns and challenge conventional practices. Advocate for new technologies, improved development processes, and architectural shifts, demonstrating a proven ability to implement change and foster innovation.