Lead Software Engineer – Backend Services

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

Role Summary

Lead the design, delivery, and operational excellence of production-grade backend services that support mission-critical workflows. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role based in Boston, MA and offered as a hybrid position. You will own foundational service components and runtime operations for Java/Spring Boot systems, drive reliability and performance in production, and influence architecture and engineering practices across teams. This role reports to a senior technical leader.

Team Summary

The Backend Platform and Productivity team builds and maintains scalable backend services, shared frameworks, and engineering patterns that enable product teams to ship reliable software quickly and safely. The team partners with application engineers, architects, platform teams, cloud/infrastructure teams, and product stakeholders to improve service reliability, observability, developer experience, and operational maturity. Responsibilities include building shared libraries and templates, defining architectural guardrails, improving production readiness, and mentoring engineers to adopt consistent, production-grade practices. The team values clear documentation, practical automation, measurable service objectives, and repeatable patterns that support long-term maintainability.

Essential Responsibilities

• Develop and own foundational components and operational practices for backend services implemented in Java and Spring Boot

• Define, document, and defend architectural decisions; establish guardrails and reusable patterns for service design and integration

• Improve operational posture by tuning JVM settings, managing connection pools, designing scaling strategies, and optimizing resource utilization.

• Manage monitoring, alerting, and observability for business-critical services; define and improve meaningful SLIs/SLOs and dashboards

• Drive production reliability by participating in on-call rotations, leading incident response, coordinating post-incident reviews, and delivering durable fixes

• Implement and improve CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, containerization, and orchestration practices to accelerate safe deployments

• Analyze system performance, identify bottlenecks or cost inefficiencies, and execute pragmatic optimization plans with minimal direction

• Mentor and coach engineers, lead design reviews, and produce runbooks, onboarding guides, and documentation to enable broader adoption

• Evaluate and integrate AI-assisted engineering tools and workflows to improve developer productivity, automation, diagnostics, and operational response

• Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams to adopt cloud-native operational practices and ensure secure, cost-effective use of infrastructure

Additional Responsibilities

• Participate in cross-team technical working groups to align patterns and shared services across engineering organizations

• Support capacity planning, cost forecasting, and resource optimization discussions with engineering and finance partners

• Contribute to hiring, interview design, and candidate evaluation for engineering roles

• Run periodic architecture and operations reviews to validate adherence to documented decisions and engineering standards

• Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to translate requirements into reliable, testable service designs

• Maintain and improve service runbooks, disaster recovery plans, and continuity documentation

• Prototype improvements to developer tooling and local development environments to reduce onboarding friction.

• Represent the team in compliance and security reviews related to service design and data handling

Education and Experience

• 6 to 10 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating distributed systems

• Strong expertise in Java and JVM performance tuning for production systems

• Experience owning large, business-critical services in production, including monitoring, deployment strategies, and incident management

• Hands-on experience with Spring Boot and service design patterns such as layered, modular, or hexagonal architectures

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and services, such as virtual compute, containers, and object storage, and with cloud-native operational practices

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, containers, and orchestration platforms

• Proven experience mentoring engineers, leading design reviews, and producing architectural documentation and operational runbooks

• Strong troubleshooting and performance analysis skills, with the ability to implement optimizations independently

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Expected Compensation

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.