Job Title: Engineering Manager, NOC Automation and Custom Tools

Position Summary
athenahealth is seeking an Engineering Manager, NOC Automation & Custom Tools to lead a team that builds, delivers, and operates internally facing applications supporting the Network Operations Center and related operational functions.

This role is best suited for a people leader with a strong software engineering background who has grown from hands-on full-stack engineering experience and has built applications across private and public cloud environments. The leader in this role will combine technical judgment, delivery ownership, and coaching to help the team improve operational workflows, service visibility, reliability, and the day-to-day experience of operational users.

About the Team
The team builds custom software and internal tools that improve the effectiveness, scale, and resilience of NOC operations. These applications support alert and incident management workflows and partner closely with engineering, infrastructure, operations, security, and business stakeholders to solve operational problems through software.

Essential Job Responsibilities

• People leadership and team development
  
  • Lead, coach, and develop a team of software engineers.
  • Set clear priorities, goals, and expectations aligned to business and operational needs.
  • Manage sprint planning, work intake, delivery tracking, staffing, performance management, and career development.
  • Create an inclusive, accountable team environment that supports technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Internal application delivery
  
  • Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to translate operational pain points into scalable software solutions.
  • Design, build, and support internal applications, services, and workflow tools for operational users.
  • Support both frontend and backend development with maintainable, secure, performant solutions.
  • Guide delivery of software that works effectively across private cloud and public cloud environments.
• Automation and workflow modernization
  
  • Identify opportunities to automate manual and semi-manual operational workflows.
  • Use orchestration, event-driven systems, APIs, and AI-assisted solutions to reduce manual effort and improve response times.
  • Guide the team in applying AI engineering patterns such as RAG, semantic search, MCP-enabled integrations, workflow orchestration, and human-in-the-loop systems.
  • Establish practical standards for safe and effective AI use in internal applications, including evaluation, observability, access controls, prompt/context management, output validation, and fallback paths.
• Technical leadership and engineering practices
  
  • Provide technical leadership across architecture, code reviews, release planning, and production readiness.
  • Promote strong engineering practices including source control, automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and alerting.
  • Collaborate with platform, infrastructure, and security teams to meet enterprise standards for availability, access control, compliance, and supportability.
  • Participate in incident response and operational review processes to reduce repetitive manual effort and improve resiliency.
• Measurement and continuous improvement
  
  • Use metrics, user feedback, operational insights, and team health indicators to improve application quality, developer productivity, and stakeholder satisfaction.
  • Build preventive improvements based on root-cause learning and operational issues.
  • Support software delivery that is reliable, observable, and aligned to business needs.

Expected Education & Experience

• Demonstrated success leading engineering teams in a people management role.
• Strong software or infrastructure engineering background with hands-on production application experience.
• Experience delivering custom internal tools or business applications that support operational or enterprise users.
• Experience as a full-stack engineer with working knowledge of frontend and backend technologies.
• Experience building software in both private cloud and public cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of Agile, CI/CD, automated testing, and release management.
• Experience identifying and automating manual operational workflows using software, APIs, event-driven design, orchestration, and AI-enabled approaches.
• Familiarity with AI application patterns such as RAG, semantic search, vector-based retrieval, context management, and secure enterprise integrations.
• Ability to lead through ambiguity, prioritize effectively, and make practical technical and organizational decisions.
• Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a closely related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of software and/or infrastructure engineering experience in production environments.
• 2+ years of people management experience leading software engineers.
• Hands-on experience developing and delivering full-stack applications.
• Experience building and operating software in cloud-based environments, including private and public cloud contexts.
• Experience implementing or managing CI/CD pipelines and modern software release practices.
• Experience collaborating with infrastructure, operations, and security teams in complex enterprise environments.
• Strong proficiency in Python and JavaScript, with substantial experience in Node.js and React.

Additional Experience

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including application design, distributed systems concepts, API design, debugging, and maintainability.
• Deep proficiency in Python and JavaScript.
• Strong experience building backend services and automation using Python and Node.js.
• Strong experience building modern frontend applications using React.
• Experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or similar.
• Knowledge of cloud services and deployment models across AWS, private cloud, containerized environments, or similar infrastructure.
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Harness, GitLab CI, or similar.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code and deployment automation tools such as Puppet and Terraform.
• Strong understanding of observability practices, including monitoring, logging, alerting, dashboards, and operational health metrics.
• Experience designing and evaluating AI-enabled workflow automation, including RAG, semantic search, vector stores, prompt engineering, A2A concepts, human-in-the-loop review, and enterprise tool integration patterns.
• Familiarity with protocols such as MCP or similar context and tool invocation frameworks.
• Strong understanding of secure software development practices and access-controlled internal application design.
• Strong people leadership capabilities, including coaching, delegation, feedback, conflict resolution, and team development.

Why This Role Matters
This role helps improve the reliability and efficiency of NOC operations by turning manual work into scalable internal software. The work combines engineering leadership, operational problem-solving, and AI-enabled automation to create better tools for the teams that support athenahealth's platform.

Expected Compensation
$136,000 - $232,000
The base salary range shown reflects the full range for this role from minimum to maximum. At athenahealth, base pay depends on multiple factors, including job-related experience, relevant knowledge and skills, how your qualifications compare to others in similar roles, and geographical market rates. Base pay is only one part of our competitive Total Rewards package - depending on role eligibility, we offer both short and long-term incentives by way of an annual discretionary bonus plan, variable compensation plan, and equity plans.