The Principal Software Engineer leads the design and delivery of backend software for athenahealth’s Collector product. Based in Boston, MA with a hybrid work arrangement, this role partners with product, architecture, and engineering teams to solve complex revenue cycle challenges using distributed systems, Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes, and related technologies.
Team Summary:
athenaCollector is a critical part of the athenaOne platform, helping medical provider organizations manage revenue cycle operations with accuracy, scale, and reliability. The product supports essential workflows across claims submission, claims follow-up, payment processing & posting, billing, payer connectivity, and exception handling, all of which contribute to improved financial performance and stronger operational visibility. The team works on a complex environment that includes both a large enterprise monolith and newer platform components, requiring thoughtful technical decisions, careful integration, and a balance between near-term delivery and long-term maintainability. By improving automation and streamlining revenue cycle processes, athenaCollector helps healthcare organizations spend more time focused on patient care and less time managing manual administrative work.
Essential Job Responsibilities:
- Lead the design, development, and delivery of high-quality software within an agile, cross-functional team, owning technical decisions and guiding implementation in alignment with architectural standards and business goals.
- Solve complex system challenges across both an existing enterprise monolith and newer platform services in parallel, while driving production readiness through sound practices for testing, reliability, observability, and operational readiness.
- Establish and improve engineering standards across teams, including code review practices and spec-driven and test-driven development approaches.
- Partner with product and engineering stakeholders to surface risks early, clarify tradeoffs, and support timely decision-making.
- Mentor engineers and help grow senior engineers into more independent, higher-impact contributors.
- Integrate AI coding assistants and agentic development tools into everyday workflows, evaluate their fit for the team, and help establish shared norms for effective and responsible use in design, coding, testing, and review.
Additional Job Responsibilities:
- Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Support collaboration between product and engineering by creating clarity around scope, dependencies, and delivery risks.
- Contribute to planning, estimation, and prioritization discussions as needed.
- Participate in design reviews, retrospectives, and continuous improvement activities.
- Support hiring, interviewing, and onboarding efforts when needed.
- Share technical knowledge through mentorship, documentation, and team learning sessions.
- Help strengthen delivery practices in Agile environments, including adapting workflows to support AI-assisted engineering.
Expected Education & Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 12+ years of engineering experience in a product engineering organization, with demonstrated progression into technical leadership.
- Deep backend experience in distributed systems, with a track record of designing and shipping production-grade enterprise software.
- Strong experience with Java and Spring Boot in backend development.
- Proven experience making and defending system-level architectural decisions, not only implementing within an existing design.
- Hands-on production experience with AI coding assistants or agentic development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor, including experience helping teams adopt shared usage norms.
- Experience defining engineering standards, code review practices, spec-driven development, test-driven development, and testing strategy across multiple teams.
- Experience working with PostgreSQL, Oracle, AWS services, Kubernetes, and Terraform; React experience is strongly preferred.
- Ability to work effectively across a complex enterprise monolith and a newer technology platform in parallel.
- Healthcare domain experience, especially in revenue cycle management (RCM), claims processing, or billing, is a plus.
- Experience improving Agile delivery environments, ideally with exposure to adapting team processes for AI-assisted delivery.
Expected Compensation
$164,000 - $280,000
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.
