Role Summary:The Software Architect leads architecture strategy for complex software and AI systems in a healthcare environment. This role is based in Boston, MA and follows a hybrid work model. The architect will define target-state architecture, guide multi-quarter modernization plans, and help engineering teams deliver scalable, reliable, and compliant platform capabilities. This position reports to the VP engineering.
Team Summary: We are seeking a Director-level Architect to define and drive architecture strategy for complex software and AI systems in a healthcare environment, with a strong emphasis on Insurance and Payment space modernization and cross-zone platform influence.
This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, systems architecture, and applied AI. The architect will establish target-state architecture, incremental migration plans, shared principles, and technical standards across engineering teams, prioritizing platform-level solutions over zone-specific duplication.
The ideal candidate brings deep experience designing large-scale distributed systems, leading large modernization programs, and operationalizing AI capabilities in production with strong attention to reliability, performance, security, maintainability, cost, and compliance.
This is an individual-contributor role with no direct reports. Its leverage comes from technical credibility and influence across organizations, not from positional authority.
Essential Job Responsibilities: - Develop target-state architecture and multi-quarter migration roadmaps for complex platform capabilities across multiple teams in Medical Insurance and Payment space.
- Define architecture principles, technical standards, reference patterns, and decision records that guide engineering execution.
- Ability to dive into monolith systems, understand the pattern, capture key details, identify pitfalls, come up with migration strategies and improvement areas
- Design scalable, reliable, and performant distributed systems with measurable outcomes tied to service-level objectives (SLOs), benchmarks, and operational results.
- Establish observability, incident response, runbook, and capacity planning practices that improve system health and operational readiness.
- Evaluate event-driven and workflow orchestration approaches, including failure modes, resiliency patterns, and interoperability across consuming teams.
- Partner with engineering, product, security, and operations leaders to influence platform direction and modernization priorities without direct authority.
- Review application, data, and integration designs to ensure alignment with architecture standards, compliance requirements, and long-term platform goals.
- Guide technical tradeoff discussions and decision-making across teams, balancing delivery speed, maintainability, cost, and risk.
- Apply AI experience to architect, evaluate, and govern production AI capabilities, including orchestration, tool-calling patterns, context and state handling, monitoring, and model risk controls.
- Use current hands-on technical depth in infrastructure as code, container platforms, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and Java or a comparable modern language to prototype, review, and refine solutions.
Additional Job Responsibilities: - Support modernization planning for shared platform services and common capabilities.
- Contribute to architecture review forums and design governance processes.
- Help define integration standards, versioning approaches, and contract management practices.
- Participate in incident reviews and help translate findings into architecture improvements.
- Mentor engineers and architects through design feedback and technical discussion.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend where they should or should not be applied.
- Collaborate on long-range planning for platform investments and technical debt reduction.
- Assist in defining security, privacy, auditability, and access-control patterns for regulated systems.
Expected Education & Experience: - Typically requires 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant architecture ownership across multiple teams.
- Demonstrated experience leading architecture strategy for complex, distributed software systems.
- Hands-on experience on AWS, Java, AI tools, enterprise applications, Kubernetes and modern LLM tools
- Proven success creating target-state architectures and multi-quarter migration plans with measurable delivery outcomes.
- Experience defining and operationalizing architecture principles, standards, reference patterns, and architecture decision records.
- Strong background in system design for scalability, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
- Deep knowledge of observability and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, including SLOs, alerting, incident management, and post-mortems.
- Experience with event-driven architectures, API design, contract versioning, and workflow orchestration.
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, container platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and tooling.
- Experience designing or governing AI-enabled systems in production, including orchestration, monitoring, and model risk considerations.
- Experience building systems in regulated environments with attention to compliance, consent, data governance, auditability, and access control.
- Strong communication and influencing skills with the ability to drive adoption across teams and functions.
Expected Compensation$216,000 - $366,000
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.
