Location: NYC Metro Area (Williamsburg Office, 3+ days/week)
Reports to: CEO
We're looking for a Head of Engineering to scale our engineering organization at Photon. This is the top technical leadership role. You'll be accountable for engineering across the platform: patient experience, customer integrations, the infrastructure that connects prescribers, patients, and pharmacies. You'll set technical direction, grow and develop a team, and own how we build across the org.
You'll work as part of the leadership team, partnering with the CEO, Product, Design, Commercial, and Ops to decide what we build, how fast, and at what cost. You'll be responsible for the things that don't show up in a single sprint: org structure, technical strategy, the bar for talent, and the reliability of infrastructure that millions of patients depend on.
If you've scaled engineering teams in a complex space, you can set direction without waiting to be told what to do, and you want ownership of a function at a real inflection point, this role is for you.
Core Responsibilities- Own the engineering organization from structure, prioritization, and how teams are organized across patient experience, integrations, platform, and internal systems
- Set and drive technical strategy and architecture direction in close partnership with Product
- Build the leadership layer: hire, develop, and manage engineering managers and senior engineers, and raise the bar on the talent we bring in and keep
- Own execution and delivery across the full product surface, with clear priorities, strong alignment, and consistent shipping
- Own engineering's operational health: reliability, uptime, on-call, and incident response for prescribing infrastructure that can't go down quietly
- Own the security, privacy, and compliance posture of engineering in partnership with the relevant teams (HIPAA and beyond)
- Partner with the CEO and leadership team on company strategy, roadmap, and the hard tradeoffs
- Build and steward a strong engineering culture rooted in ownership, accountability, and high standards
- Manage engineering tooling decisions and key technical vendor relationships
- Represent engineering to the board, investors, and partners when it matters
Required Qualifications- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years leading engineering teams - including managing managers or owning a full engineering function
- Strong track record of building and scaling engineering teams at early or growth stage
- Experience owning technical strategy and architecture for a meaningful product or platform
- Familiarity with APIs, integrations, marketplaces, or distributed systems at scale
- Proven delivery across multiple teams or a full product surface area
- Ability to create clarity in ambiguous environments - across priorities, ownership, and decision-making
- Experience working closely with Product, Commercial, and Ops at a leadership level in a fast-paced environment
- Strong communication skills, including the ability to address difficult situations directly and represent engineering to executives, the board, and partners
- Experience leveraging AI in engineering workflows or products
- Hands-on enough to stay technically credible and dive in when the situation calls for it
Preferred Qualifications- Experience in healthcare, fintech, or other complex, regulated environments
- Experience building or owning infrastructure platforms
- Familiarity with compliance frameworks (HIPAA, SOC 2)
Pay TransparencyThe estimated base salary for this role is $240,000 - $280,000 USD annually. Actual compensation will depend on skills, qualifications, and experience, and includes equity and benefits. At our stage, we place significant value on equity as part of total compensation.
