athenahealth - Lead Software Engineer - Frontend & Backend Technologies

The Platform Services division within athenahealth is focused on building, enhancing, and maintaining foundational components that enable all development teams to deliver innovative healthcare solutions.

As a key member of our platform team managing Federated GraphQL Services, you will work on developing a scalable and resilient GraphQL layer that acts as an abstraction between front-end and back-end APIs, including an Apollo GraphQL router and the required services.

You would have a focus of what would take to develop scalable and low latent systems. This role offers a unique opportunity to lead technical excellence in a fast-paced environment, delivering high-impact APIs used by in-org Dev teams.

We are seeking an experienced Lead Software Engineer with a deep understanding of web fundamentals and distributed systems, a hands-on approach with modern backend and frontend technologies, and the passion to solve complex problems with innovative solutions.

This role demands strong technical expertise, ownership, and a growth mindset.

Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to :

Technical Execution :

- Develop and maintain a high-performance, scalable GraphQL federation layer leveraging Apollo GraphQL Router and other related components.

- Understand and follow coding conventions, architectures, and best practices.

- Write, debug, and deploy code to production and deliver timely fixes.

- Adhere to DoD (Definition of Done) as part of the sprint, including unit tests, functional testing, code reviews, no regressions, bug fixes, documentation and adhere to best coding practices.

- Perform peer code reviews and follow athenahealths processes to ensure quality standards.

- Identify and implement the right tooling and libraries required for in-house and third-party development teams to adopt.

- Produce unambiguous, precise and comprehensive technical design specifications and documentations for federation architecture, API integrations, and service components.

- Implement robust monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure system health and performance.

- Ability to debug, troubleshoot, and optimize GraphQL services and related backend APIs in distributed cloud environments.

- Continuously enhance service reliability, scalability, and maintainability through best practices in coding, testing, and deployment.

- Be a significant voice contributing to the GraphQL Governance and stewardship committees.

Contributions to the Team :

- Master the domain of federated GraphQL architecture and related frontend/ backend technologies.

- Take ownership of what gets released post-release, emphasizing user adoption and operational excellence as success criteria.

- Contribute actively to Agile ceremonies to drive continuous improvement.

- Volunteer for backlog tasks, navigate cross-team dependencies, and promote best practices within the team for collaborative delivery.

- Drive a culture of self-organization, peer reviews, and knowledge sharing.

Cross-Functional Coordination and Communication :

- Partner with product/ engineering managers, front-end developers, and backend engineers to ensure alignment of technical goals with business needs.

- Foster strong working relationships with cross-functional teams, sharing insights on architecture, security, and API design.

- Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Education, Experience, & Skills Required :

- 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a track record of leading large, distributed architecture projects.

- Proven experience in an Agile environment, SDLC, deployment, and operational support of scalable services.

- Strong knowledge of core web and cloud fundamentals: HTTP, DOM, REST, APIs, Public Cloud (AWS preferred).

- Hands-on experience with Node.js, TypeScript, JavaScript and GraphQL.

- A strong understanding of OOPS along with current or previous experience in Java programming and Spring Framework.

- Practical expertise with Apollo Federation, GraphQL schema design, and federation best practices.

- Familiarity with containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.

- Experience building and managing scalable APIs and microservices in public cloud environments.

- A bachelors/ master's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.