Principal Software Engineer - Integration & Data Architecture

Role Description

GHX is a healthcare supply chain exchange. At its core, what we do is move transaction data reliably between thousands of trading partners. Integration and data architecture are not supporting concerns here; they are central to how our product works and how we scale.

This role owns the long-term stewardship of both problems: how data is modeled, accessed, and owned within our services, and how it flows reliably across them. You will work directly with application teams as a hands-on technical partner and architect, setting technical direction, establishing integration and data patterns, and ensuring the architectural quality we build today does not become tomorrow's maintenance burden.

Your peers are strong backend engineers building real products. You earn trust through depth and direct engagement, not architecture diagrams from a distance.

What You'll Do

• Integration Architecture & Event-Driven Systems
  • Define GHX's integration patterns: outbox, saga, CDC, event-carried state transfer, dual-write mitigation, and when to choreograph vs. orchestrate.
  • Guide service boundary design: where to draw domain lines, how to handle shared reference data, and how to prevent shared-database coupling between services.
  • Own the messaging and eventing layer: topic and queue design, schema contracts, partitioning, retention, consumer group management, dead-letter handling, replay, and operational monitoring.
  • Lead the architectural direction for replacing GHX's homegrown event bus with a cloud-native messaging platform, and establish the standards teams will build on after the transition.
  • Guide teams on streaming vs. batch trade-offs and on replacing batch- or file-driven pipelines with event-driven flows where latency and reliability require it.
• API Design, Contracts & DevOps
  • Establish REST API design standards: resource modeling, versioning strategy, error contracts, pagination, and backward compatibility.
  • Own the API governance lifecycle: versioning policy, deprecation timelines, breaking change detection in CI/CD, schema compatibility enforcement, and consumer-driven contract testing.
  • Define traffic management patterns for API transitions: versioned routing, canary rollouts, and gateway configuration for safe rollout and rollback.
  • Guide teams on integration style selection and review service designs for evolvability and downstream interface cost.
• Data Architecture & Database Practice
  • Work with teams on schema design, data modeling, and aligning data ownership with service boundaries.
  • Guide datastore selection by workload: read/write patterns, consistency requirements, and cost trade-offs across relational, document, key-value, and analytical options.
  • Advise on ORM vs. raw query trade-offs and define data access standards that avoid common anti-patterns (N+1, chatty calls, unbounded result sets).
  • Guide teams on performant data access and zero-downtime schema evolution: indexing strategy, backfill approaches, dual-write windows, and rollback-safe migrations.
  • Establish replication and syndication patterns for cross-service data movement: CDC, change streams, materialized views, and read models.
• Enablement & Standards
  • Run design reviews, workshops, and office hours to raise integration and data fundamentals across engineering.
  • Produce decision records, design guides, and reference implementations teams can build from.
  • Present architectural trade-offs and technical risk to engineering leadership, product, and senior stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building distributed systems, grounded in hands-on software development as an individual contributor.
• Deep experience with event-driven architecture and distributed systems.
• Hands-on AWS experience with data and integration services.
• Strong data architecture fundamentals across relational and NoSQL.
• Experience designing REST APIs with attention to versioning, backward compatibility, and data contracts.
• Experience working directly with application teams during service decomposition.
• Strong communication across levels.
• Heavy personal investment in AI-assisted and agentic development.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating with external partners or enterprise platforms.
• Healthcare or other regulated industry experience.
• Azure PaaS experience.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Analytics data layer experience.
• Data architecture for ML/LLM applications.
• Prior Principal or Staff Engineer experience.

Why This Role Matters

GHX is in the middle of a significant architectural transformation: decomposing a large-scale monolith into independently deployable services. The integration and data architecture decisions made during this transition will shape how we build and operate systems for the next decade.

This is a permanent leadership function. The person in this role will define the technical character of how GHX connects its systems, set standards that persist as the organization scales, and be a direct partner to engineering leadership on the most consequential architectural decisions we make.

Estimated Salary Range for this position

$150,000 to $214,000 plus bonus. The base salary range represents the anticipated low and high end of the GHX’s salary range for this position.

Benefits

• Health, vision, and dental insurance.
• Accident and life insurance.
• 401k matching.
• Paid-time off.
• Education reimbursement.