Lead Software Engineer, Tech Standardization

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

Role Summary: The Lead Software Engineer, Tech Standardization leads modernization, observability integration, and internal platform capabilities that improve software delivery at scale. This hybrid role is based in Boston, MA and focuses on helping teams standardize engineering practices, strengthen developer experience, and support reliable platform services. The role works closely with engineering and cross-functional stakeholders to align priorities, support technical decisions, and drive execution. This position reports to the Director.

Team Summary:
The Internal Developer Platform team supports engineering teams by providing platform capabilities that improve developer productivity, standardization, and adoption of supported engineering practices. The team leads modernization and migration efforts, supports observability integration, and helps create paved paths for building, deploying, and operating software more consistently. It works across engineering, product, and partner teams to deliver shared tooling, supported patterns, and reliable platform services that improve execution and consistency. The team plays an important role in helping engineering groups move faster while maintaining quality, security, and operational readiness.

Essential Job Responsibilities:

• Guide and mentor a team of engineers, creating an environment that supports collaboration, growth, and strong engineering practices.

• Define and execute the strategy for internal developer platform capabilities that improve developer productivity, standardization, and adoption of supported engineering practices.

• Lead modernization, standardization, and migration efforts across platform services and engineering workflows.

• Lead observability integration work by delivering supported software development kits (SDKs), instrumentation patterns, and telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, and distributed tracing.

• Improve the developer experience through paved paths, supported libraries, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, automation, and code-quality standards.

• Oversee multiple modernization programs to ensure alignment with business requirements, compliance standards, delivery commitments, and engineering best practices.

• Work with product managers, stakeholders, and partner teams to align goals and deliverables, communicate tradeoffs, and manage expectations.

• Serve as a visible U.S. time zone leader for technology standards, providing timely decisions, architectural guidance, and cross-team connections.

• Apply an artificial intelligence (AI)-first mindset by helping the team use AI-assisted tools to improve engineering quality, speed, and learning in day-to-day workflows.

• Drive engineering best practices including testing, continuous integration and delivery, application resiliency, security, service ownership, and incident learning.

Additional Job Responsibilities:

• Support hiring, onboarding, and team development efforts as needed.

• Contribute to design discussions, planning activities, and technical reviews.

• Help communicate progress, risks, and dependencies across workstreams.

• Participate in cross-team coordination to improve alignment and delivery.

• Support documentation, knowledge sharing, and standardization efforts.

• Help strengthen operational readiness and follow-up actions from incidents.

• Encourage responsible adoption of cloud, automation, and AI-enabled engineering practices.

• Represent the team in recurring forums focused on standards, migration, and modernization.

• Assist with roadmap refinement and prioritization discussions.

Expected Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• At least 6 years of professional software engineering experience.

• Experience leading engineers, technical projects, or engineering workstreams.

• Experience with platform engineering, internal developer platforms, cloud enablement, or related modernization efforts.

• Strong hands-on programming experience in Java and/or Python.

• Strong working knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, cloud-native architecture, and large-scale platform migration patterns.

• Experience engineering observability Software Development Kits (SDKs), instrumentation patterns, and telemetry integrations using Datadog, OpenTelemetry, logs, metrics, and traces.

• Working knowledge of infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automation, security controls, and reliable software delivery practices.

• Experience working in regulated environments with expectations for availability, privacy, security, and compliance.

• Strong coaching, communication, and stakeholder-management skills.

• Experience using responsible AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve productivity and quality.

Expected Compensation

$143,000 - $243,000

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.