Software Engineer

Software Engineer

Location: St. Louis, MO

Experience: 10+ Duration: Long Term

Job Description:

Key Responsibilities

• Product Focus & Innovation: Closely collaborate with engineering teams to architect and develop resilient, reliable, scalable, secure, compliant, and highly available products, while specifically researching and prototyping new architectural patterns for AI integration.
• Discovery & Technical Roadmap: Contribute toward technical roadmap refinement by researching new technologies, tools, and frameworks for potential adoption, particularly those related to Generative AI and Agentic Architectures.
• Standards/Best Practices: Identify, document, communicate, champion, and drive adoption for standards, policies, processes, best practices, and aligned software architecture/software engineering points of view, including new paradigms introduced by AI systems.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and feedback to team members to grow overall team capabilities, especially in emerging technical areas.
• Outcome-Oriented: Display ownership of outcomes. Provide trusted expertise for effort estimates and offer alternate approach recommendations along with associated tradeoffs/risks where appropriate.
• Industry Knowledge: Keep current on industry standards and bring insights back to the team.

Required Experience/Skills

• The role requires a strong foundation in core software engineering and distributed systems, coupled with experience in AI-focused platforms.
• 10+ years of overall hands-on software engineering experience.
• 6+ years of experience and expertise in designing, developing, and consuming RESTful APIs.
• Experience in architecting, designing, and developing complex, cloud-native, scalable, performant, and highly available distributed systems.
• Expertise in microservice architectural patterns and design.

Technical Stack

• Expertise in Java/Spring Boot.
• Experience in Python
• Expert understanding of relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., Postgres, MongoDB, Neo4j), SQL, and database/schema design.
• Experience with GCP compute platforms, including container orchestration (Google Kubernetes Engine - GKE) and serverless (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions).
• Experience with message broker/event queue technologies (e.g., Rabbit, GCP Pub/Sub).
• Experience working with API management platforms (e.g., Apigee X).
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Preferred Experience / Skills

• Generative AI Platforms: Experience with Google Cloud's AI platform services, such as Vertex AI, Agent Builder, and related Generative AI tools (e.g., LangChain).
• Data & Analytics: Experience with data warehousing and analytics platforms, particularly Google BigQuery.
• Healthcare Data: Experience with healthcare data standards, such as HL7 and FHIR.
• Innovation & Prototyping: Demonstrated ability to drive innovation, research emerging technologies, and build rapid prototypes/proofs-of-concept.

Characteristics We Seek

• Be curious about technology. The software engineering industry is constantly changing and evolving. At Ascension, we embrace change and are curious to learn how the latest technology can be used to improve the lives of patients and our clinicians.
• Learn and grow professionally. We strive for continuous improvement of our Ascension Studio organization and our team members do the same. This comes from the path of constant learning, in addition to reflecting on past experiences for improvement opportunities.
• Always ready for change. A rolling stone gathers no moss, and neither do we. We accept that change is always around us, and our work is no exception. We navigate change through early and often communication; engage the ambiguous; promote diversity; accept new ideas; and lean on learning agility.
• Seek feedback: Feedback is important to us. We use it as a guide for our own development, and we build our software with feedback built into the process. It is incorporated into our software development lifecycle with design, code reviews, unit tests, and continuous integration. Feedback is also integrated into our solutions with application performance monitoring (APM) and usage analytics to help us learn methods to improve.
• Sound awareness of self and situations. We understand the importance of knowing our best selves, and the value gained from our teams to compensate for our shortcomings. Equally important is our ability to assess situations with a calm and clear mind, and develop next steps to proceed in the best manner possible.
• Demonstrate positivity. Our organization's focus is all about solving problems, and most of these problems are challenging. We try not to let that get in our way of thinking positively -- instead it's what motivates us to reach higher.
• Work with your team. We understand that our best work comes from working together. Our teams enjoy working together, sharing knowledge, helping, mentoring, and delivering our best for the communities we serve.
• Live Ascension’s core values. The Ascension core values are the standard that we hold ourselves to and a source of pride for us. We live by them. Our core values include: service of the poor; reverence; integrity; wisdom; creativity; and dedication.