Lead Software Engineer – Backend, PEX

Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

Position Summary:

We are looking for a Lead Backend Software Engineer to join our cross-disciplined team enabling the next generation of Healthcare Patient Conversation features! Within our Patient Experience sub-division, we offer patients seamless access to their health records through our innovative athena

Patient mobile application and browser-based solutions, and we break down barriers by connecting patients to their providers through cutting-edge telehealth solutions. With your help, we will revolutionize the way healthcare providers engage their patients through AI-enhanced communication methods. This role reports to the Senior Engineering Manager.

About the Team:

Our Conversational Messaging Platform development team is building a greenfield next generation capability for healthcare providers and their patients. We connect patients with their healthcare providers in their time of need over their preferred channel (SMS, secure web chat, Voice) by developing and supporting our emerging Patient Conversations product. Our team is comprised of talented frontend and backend software developers, User Experience Designers, and embedded Product Owners who collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, architects, and Product Managers.

We embrace an experimental mindset in how we build and deliver software – continuously exploring methodologies and practices that help us ship quality functionality quickly and gather real customer feedback as features evolve.

Essential

Job Responsibilities:

Design, build, and support a high-availability enterprise service enabling healthcare providers to effectively communicate with their patients across organizations of all sizes

Design, define, and continuously refine prompt engineering strategies; integrate and operationalize LLMs within backend services to enable intelligent workflows, automate decisioning, and enhance provider-patient communication capabilities

Leverage AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude, Augment, Codex) to accelerate the SDLC - from generating specifications and performing technical discovery to implementing code and delivering timely fixes

Mentor and coach junior developers and colleagues unfamiliar with your areas of expertise

Ensure adherence to SDLC practices within the team, promoting good documentation and software engineering best practices

Influence coding standards and development processes for the team Collaborate with cross-functional teams, architects, and Product Managers Additional

Job Responsibilities:

Proactively identify and address stability, scalability, security, PHI, and resiliency challenges

Integrate our capabilities with third-party messaging services via 3rd party APIsExpected

Education & Experience:

8+ years of software engineering experience with enterprise server development (Required)3+ years of experience leading cloud-hosted SaaS products (Required)
Experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools throughout full SDLC (Required)
In-depth familiarity with microservice development including hexagonal/CLEAN architecture and distributed systems (Required)

Experience with Spring Boot and relational database/SQL or No SQL DB (Required)

Experience with deployment (CI/CD) pipelines including Jenkins or Harness along with git, Bitbucket, etc. (Required)2+ years of designing, evaluating, and integrating LLM-based solutions, including prompt engineering, model evaluation, and production integration within enterprise backend services (Preferred)
Bachelor's degree in a Computer Science related field (Preferred)
Experience in healthcare or customer outreach domains (Preferred)

Experience with AWS EKS and Kubernetes (Preferred)
Expected Compensation $136,000 - $232,000

The base salary range shown reflects the full range for this role from minimum to maximum. At athenahealth, base pay depends on multiple factors, including job-related experience, relevant knowledge and skills, how your qualifications compare to others in similar roles, and geographical market rates. Base pay is only one part of our competitive Total Rewards package - depending on role eligibility, we offer both short and long-term incentives by way of an annual discretionary bonus plan, variable compensation plan, and equity plans.

About athenahealth

Our vision:
In an industry that becomes more complex by the day, we stand for simplicity. We offer IT solutions and expert services that eliminate the daily hurdles preventing healthcare providers from focusing entirely on their patients — powered by our vision to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

Our company culture:
Our talented employees — or athenistas, as we call ourselves — spark the innovation and passion needed to accomplish our vision. We are a diverse group of dreamers and do-ers with unique knowledge, expertise, backgrounds, and…