Lead Member of Technical Staff - Full Stack

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.
• Desirable - a strong understanding of OOPS and current/experience in programming in Java/ 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/ Masters in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.