This role owns the long-term stewardship of both problems: how data is modeled, accessed, and owned within our services, and how it flows reliably across them. You will work directly with application teams as a hands-on technical partner and architect, setting technical direction, establishing integration and data patterns, and ensuring the architectural quality we build today does not become tomorrow's maintenance burden. Your peers are strong backend engineers building real products. You earn trust through depth and direct engagement, not architecture diagrams from a distance.
What You'll Do
Integration Architecture & Event-Driven Systems

• Define GHX's integration patterns: outbox, saga, CDC, event-carried state transfer, dual-write mitigation, and when to choreograph vs. orchestrate
• Guide service boundary design: where to draw domain lines, how to handle shared reference data, and how to prevent shared-database coupling between services
• Own the messaging and eventing layer: topic and queue design, schema contracts, partitioning, retention, consumer group management, dead-letter handling, replay, and operational monitoring
• Lead the architectural direction for replacing GHX's homegrown event bus with a cloud-native messaging platform, and establish the standards teams will build on after the transition
• Guide teams on streaming vs. batch trade-offs and on replacing batch- or file-driven pipelines with event-driven flows where latency and reliability require it

API Design, Contracts & DevOps

• Establish REST API design standards: resource modeling, versioning strategy, error contracts, pagination, and backward compatibility
• Own the API governance lifecycle: versioning policy, deprecation timelines, breaking change detection in CI/CD, schema compatibility enforcement, and consumer-driven contract testing
• Define traffic management patterns for API transitions: versioned routing, canary rollouts, and gateway configuration for safe rollout and rollback
• Guide teams on integration style selection and review service designs for evolvability and downstream interface cost

Data Architecture & Database Practice

• Work with teams on schema design, data modeling, and aligning data ownership with service boundaries
• Guide datastore selection by workload: read/write patterns, consistency requirements, and cost trade-offs across relational, document, key-value, and analytical options; for NoSQL, lead access-pattern-first design including partition strategy, secondary index selection, and partition distribution
• Advise on ORM vs. raw query trade-offs and define data access standards that avoid common anti-patterns (N+1, chatty calls, unbounded result sets)
• Guide teams on performant data access and zero-downtime schema evolution: indexing strategy, backfill approaches, dual-write windows, and rollback-safe migrations
• Establish replication and syndication patterns for cross-service data movement: CDC, change streams, materialized views, and read models

Enablement & Standards

• Run design reviews, workshops, and office hours to raise integration and data fundamentals across engineering
• Produce decision records, design guides, and reference implementations teams can build from
• Present architectural trade-offs and technical risk to engineering leadership, product, and senior stakeholders

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years building distributed systems, grounded in hands-on software development as an individual contributor: you have written and shipped production code and understand the day-to-day engineering reality your guidance needs to hold up against
• Deep experience with event-driven architecture and distributed systems: pub/sub and messaging infrastructure (Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS/EventBridge, or equivalents), integration patterns (outbox, CDC, saga, event sourcing), and failure modes including idempotency, consistency trade-offs, and operational failure handling
• Hands-on AWS experience with data and integration services: SQS, SNS, EventBridge, DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora, API Gateway, Lambda
• Strong data architecture fundamentals across relational and NoSQL: datastore selection by workload, schema and access-pattern design, ORM trade-offs, and performant data access at scale
• Experience designing REST APIs with attention to versioning, backward compatibility, and data contracts, including contract validation in CI/CD pipelines
• Experience working directly with application teams during service decomposition, and a track record of establishing integration and data standards across an engineering organization
• Strong communication across levels: writing clear decision records for engineering peers, presenting trade-offs to engineering and product leadership, and translating technical risk for senior stakeholders
• Heavy personal investment in AI-assisted and agentic development: your workflow has materially changed over the last 6-12 months, you use coding agents for substantial engineering work, and you have concrete examples of where these tools have made you meaningfully faster or produced better outcomes; the engineers around you tend to notice and follow

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating with external partners or enterprise platforms (supply chain, ERP, CRM, or similar), including migrating from batch- or file-driven pipelines to event-driven flows
• Healthcare or other regulated industry experience
• Azure PaaS experience (Service Bus, Cosmos DB, Azure Functions)
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform or equivalents)
• Analytics data layer experience: Snowflake, Redshift, or similar
• Data architecture for ML/LLM applications (vector databases, embeddings, RAG patterns)
• Prior Principal or Staff Engineer experience

What We're Looking For

You grew up as a developer. You have written the code, debugged the query plan that fell apart at scale, and been on call when a consumer queue fell behind. That experience is what makes architectural guidance credible, and what keeps decisions grounded in the reality of building and operating software. You have worked through the hard problems in distributed systems: service boundaries that do not hold, shared databases that create invisible coupling, async pipelines that fail in ways the original design never anticipated. You bring depth in both the integration layer and the data layer, and you know from experience how problems in one become problems in the other.

You are a hands-on architect who succeeds by making other engineers better. You can design the event contract, identify the breaking change in an API proposal before it ships, and dig into an operational failure when it matters. You write clear decision records, give direct feedback in design reviews, and know when to push back and when to ship. You also communicate well outside engineering: you can present a build-vs-buy decision to an executive, work through a data model with a product manager, and explain reliability risk to a business stakeholder without losing the thread.
Why This Role Matters

GHX is in the middle of a significant architectural transformation: decomposing a large-scale monolith into independently deployable services. The integration and data architecture decisions made during this transition will shape how we build and operate systems for the next decade. Getting it right is what separates genuine team autonomy from coupling that has simply moved into a distributed form.

Beyond the transformation, this is a permanent leadership function. The person in this role will define the technical character of how GHX connects its systems, set standards that persist as the organization scales, and be a direct partner to engineering leadership on the most consequential architectural decisions we make.

Estimated Salary Range for this position: $150,000 to $214,000 plus bonus

The base salary range represents the anticipated low and high end of the GHX's salary range for this position. The base salary is one component of GHX's total compensation package for employees. Other rewards and benefits include: health, vision, and dental insurance, accident and life insurance, 401k matching, paid-time off, and education reimbursement, to name a few. To view more details of our benefits, visit us here: https://www.ghx.com/about/careers/

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