JOB SUMMARY Pennant Services is seeking an experienced, hands-on Director of Engineering to lead the Application Development team that builds products for our post-acute businesses (home health, hospice, home care, and senior living).
Reporting to the Senior Vice President of Digital, the Director of Engineering leads how software is built at Pennant: the architecture, delivery system, people, and AI-native engineering practice that lets a small team deliver like a large one. The team already uses AI coding agents extensively and integrates with HCHB, Snowflake, Twilio, and Microsoft Entra ID; and many others. The ideal candidate has led a development team through the AI shift at a startup or growth-stage company, has architecture judgment they can defend, and understands the importance of speed, reliability, security, and responsiveness in a healthcare setting.
DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES Architecture & Platform
- Own the technical direction of all digital products: service boundaries, data model, integration patterns, and the platform roadmap
- Support build / buy / defer decisions and document them with the technical tradeoffs and reversal cost
- Set and enforce standards for HIPAA-grade engineering: PHI handling, audit logging, least-privilege access, and environment promotion from sandbox through production
- Keep the platform operable: observability, on-call, incident response, and cost management
AI-Native Engineering Practice
- Make AI coding agents the default for design, implementation, testing, and review; remove the barriers that keep engineers from using them well
- Build the harnesses that make agent output trustworthy: evaluation suites, automated test generation, CI gates, and review standards
- Measure delivery (cycle time, change failure rate, defects reaching the field, cost per release) and report where AI helps and where it hurts
- Partner with the Data Science team on how predictive models and LLM features ship into clinical workflows safely
Team Leadership & Delivery
- Lead, mentor, and develop the development team: weekly 1:1s, clear expectations, performance reviews, career paths, and early action on underperformance
- Recruit, hire, and retain strong engineers; own the interview loop and raise the bar with every hire
- Grow output per engineer through tooling and automation before growing headcount; if you roll your eyes at this, do not apply.
Partnership & Representation
- Represent Application Development with clinical, operations, finance, and IT leaders; translate business priorities into engineering plans and engineering constraints into business terms
- Partner with Product Management, Data, Infrastructure and others to insure the success of Digital's products.
- Participate in pilot and rollout conversations with field agencies and operational partners
- Partner with IT on shared environments, security review, identity, and the boundary between the application platform and enterprise infrastructure
- Contribute to technical strategy and investment cases, including measuring the team's impact on Pennant outcomes
JOB REQUIREMENTS (Education, Experience, Knowledge, Skills & Abilities) - 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading engineers as a people manager (1:1s, performance reviews, hiring, and difficult staffing decisions)
- Led engineering at a startup or growth-stage company through the adoption of AI-assisted development, with measurable before-and-after results (cycle time, release frequency, defect rate, or output at flat headcount)
- Personally built and shipped production software with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent) within the past 6 months
- Designed and operated a multi-service, cloud-hosted system with a production data layer and third-party integrations
- Established a quality system (CI/CD, automated testing, code review standards, incident response) rather than inheriting one
- Experience working under HIPAA, SOC 2, or comparable controls, or a credible plan for standing up PHI handling, audit logging, and access control in new and existing platforms
- Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to clinical, operational, and finance leaders
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Preferred Qualifications - Healthcare operations or EHR integration experience (HCHB, Epic, eCW, WellSky, FHIR / HL7)
- Built or ran an AI harness layer: evaluation suites, agent skills, validation frameworks, or an internal AI developer platform
- Shipped LLM-backed features to end users and evaluated them for accuracy and safety in production
- Migrated a product off a low-code or rapid-prototyping platform (e.g., Retool) onto a durable stack without stopping delivery
- Experience with Go, TypeScript / SvelteKit, Kubernetes (AKS), Snowflake, Temporal, Azure, and Microsoft Entra ID
- Experience working alongside data scientists and data engineers on a shared platform (Dataiku, Snowflake, dbt, or similar)
- Experience inside a larger company's internal product group after time at a startup
Reports To: SVP, Digital Location: Remote - Western US (Central, Mountain, or Pacific time zones) Travel: Approx. 10-15%, including periodic visits to Service Centers and field operations | Full-Time Compensation: Variable depending on experience and location; eligible for annual bonus and equity 
