Director of Software Engineering & Architecture

Director of Software Engineering & Architecture

Location: Onshore (US-based) | Reports to: Vice President of Engineering Team: Approx 14-18 offshore and 2-3 onshore with significant growth projected planned

About the Role

We are a B2B healthcare/pharmacy technology startup building a system that helps bridge the gap between fitness and wellness providers and medical providers. We're bringing architecture and technical leadership onshore to complement our offshore engineering team’s leadership. The Director of Software Engineering & Architecture will own our technical architecture and engineering execution, leading the incremental migration of our platform from a monolithic React/Node/Postgres application to a microservices architecture on AWS.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll set technical direction and manage a distributed engineering team, while staying close enough to the code to review designs, unblock hard problems, and step inon critical work when needed.

What You'll Do

• Own the system architecture (application, data & infrastructure) and engineering roadmap for our platform, in partnership with the CTO and Director of Product Engineering. Mentor technical staff in the creation of a robust, secure, scalable architecture that will allow for future growth and enhancement
• Lead the incremental re-architecture of our current monolithic application into microservices — sequencing the migration to minimize risk and disruption to a live production system
• Define and enforce engineering standards: code quality, API design, testing, CI/CD, and technical documentation
• Own delivery predictability across the engineering organization: roadmap commitments, cross-team dependency management, escalation point for delivery risks, surfacing blockers, resourcing gaps, or scope conflicts before they threaten a commitment
• Manage and mentor our offshore development and QA team (14-18 engineers) via our existing offshore Lead Developers and Development Manager, plus onshore Software Engineer(s)
• Help grow the onshore teams, including defining roles, evaluating candidates and making hire/no-hire decisions
• Translate business and product requirements into sound technical designs, accounting for non-functional requirements (scalability, availability, performance, maintainability, security)
• Make build-vs-buy and technology selection decisions
• Establish baseline security and compliance practices in our architecture and SDLC appropriate to a healthcare/pharmacy data environment (HIPAA, SOC 2), in preparation for a future Director of Security & Compliance who will own the formal compliance program
• Take an active role in development when needed: review code and provide technical oversight to architecture, design and development
• Partner with the Director of Product Engineering on roadmap feasibility, estimation, and delivery commitments
• Report technical progress, risks, and tradeoffs to the CTO to support strategic decision-making

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in a technical leadership or architecture role
• Strong program/delivery management skills — able to run predictable release cycles, manage dependencies across teams, and communicate delivery risk clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience managing distributed/offshore engineering teams, and scaling its organization’s structure and processes as headcount grows
• Demonstrated experience architecting or leading a migration from monolith to microservices in a live, production system — including how to sequence and de-risk an incremental migration
• Solid understanding of AWS infrastructure and cloud-native architecture patterns
• Ability to weigh non-functional requirements (scalability, reliability, latency, cost, security) into architecture decisions, not just functional ones
• Strong strategic engineering skills – the ability to make architectural and application development decisions taking the long-term view while minimizing technical debt
• Strong knowledge of security and compliance fundamentals relevant to healthcare data (HIPAA) and SOC 2 controls. A commitment to Security by Design best practices in software development.
• Strong communication skills; comfortable translating between technical detail and business/strategic conversations
• Experience with React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL
• Comfortable operating in a startup environment with evolving requirements and limited dedicated compliance/security resourcing today

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in healthcare, pharmacy, or another regulated B2B industry is strongly preferred
• Experience standing up engineering practices at a growth-stage startup
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, API gateways, or service mesh technologies

What Success Looks Like in the First Year

• A clear, sequenced microservices migration plan is in place and execution is underway with measurable progress
• Engineering standards and processes are defined and adopted across the offshore and onshore team
• The offshore development/QA team operates with less day-to-day oversight from the CTO
• Architecture decisions demonstrably account for HIPAA/SOC 2-relevant considerations, setting a strong foundation for the future Security & Compliance function