Design Engineer

At HCA Healthcare, our Digital Transformation and Innovation (DT&I) team is redefining what’s possible inpatient care. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, automation, and digital technologies, DT&I is helping drive meaningful improvements in clinical outcomes, reduce manual workload, and expand the reach of our care teams. If you're passionate about using technology to improve human life, this is where your work truly matters.

The Staff Design Engineer is a senior individual contributor within the Product Design organization who combines product design judgment, modern software engineering practices, and AI-assisted application development to transform product concepts into secure, deployable software solutions.

This role serves as the technical extension of the Product Design team, helping bridge the gap between design intent and production implementation. Working alongside product designers, researchers, and stakeholders, the Staff Design Engineer converts validated workflows, prototypes, and user experiences into production-ready applications that can be deployed within HCA Healthcare’s enterprise ecosystem.

Unlike a traditional product designer focused primarily on research and visual design, or a traditional software engineer focused primarily on implementation, this role operates at the intersection of design, product, engineering, security, and platform delivery. The role is responsible for ensuring design-led solutions can successfully progress from discovery through prototype, technical hardening, enterprise review, cloud deployment, and ongoing iteration.

This role helps accelerate the delivery of both customer-facing healthcare applications and internal enterprise software used across Digital Transformation & Innovation (DT&I) and HCA Healthcare. This role reports to the Director of Product Design Engineering within the Design organization.

• Lead product design and user experience

  • Partner with Product Designers to create intuitive, accessible, and user-centered application experiences.

  • Contribute to user flows, wireframes, prototypes, design systems, interaction patterns, and application architecture.

  • Ensure design intent, usability, accessibility, and workflow integrity are maintained throughout implementation.

  • Participate in design reviews and provide technical guidance during discovery and solution development.

• Use AI design and development tools

  • Leverage tools such as Lovable, Cursor, Codex, Git Hub Copilot, and emerging AI platforms to accelerate product discovery, prototyping, and application development.

  • Evaluate, improve, and harden AI-generated code and application architectures.

  • Establish repeatable workflows that improve design-to-production velocity across the organization.

  • Help define best practices for AI-assisted product development within Product Design.

• Build and refine working applications

  • Transform design prototypes into functional, scalable applications.

  • Refactor generated or prototype code into maintainable, enterprise-grade solutions.

  • Develop reusable components, frontend architectures, and implementation patterns that align with design system standards.

  • Improve application quality, responsiveness, accessibility, maintainability, observability, and performance.

  • Serve as the primary technical bridge between Product Design and Engineering delivery teams.

• Integrate with backend services and data

  • Connect applications to APIs, MCP servers, databases, authentication providers, enterprise systems, and healthcare data platforms.

  • Design secure integration patterns that support scalability and long-term maintainability.

  • Collaborate with platform, infrastructure, and enterprise architecture teams to ensure alignment with organizational standards.

  • Ensure data is handled safely with appropriate validation, access controls, privacy protections, and error handling.

• Apply security and production readiness

  • Own technical hardening activities required to move applications from prototype to enterprise deployment.

  • Review applications for security risks, exposed secrets, insecure APIs, dependency vulnerabilities, authentication concerns, and access control gaps.

  • Partner with cybersecurity, compliance, and engineering teams to ensure applications satisfy enterprise security, privacy, regulatory, and governance requirements.

  • Support security reviews and production readiness assessments.

• Support cloud deployment and maintenance

  • Support deployment to approved cloud environments including Azure, Google Cloud, and other enterprise hosting platforms.

  • Assist with CI/CD pipelines, environment configuration, monitoring, logging, release management, and operational support.

  • Collaborate with platform engineering teams to ensure applications meet enterprise reliability and operational standards.

  • Help establish deployment patterns that reduce friction between Product Design and enterprise delivery team.

• Collaborate across teams

  • Work closely with business stakeholders,…