Director of Engineering, Foundations

About the company

The company Health Institute is a membership-based primary and specialty health care practice with a focus on prevention and longevity. We bring together a multidisciplinary team of renowned physicians to provide proactive, preventive, and precision-based care for the company members and their families. All care, including primary care, advanced screening and diagnostics, urgent care, specialty care, 24/7 home visits, and imaging is included in members’ annual fee.

Our mission is to make healthspan and lifespan equal for all by translating science into medicine in real-time, all while bringing humanity back into health care. Delivering such robust, personalized, and preventive health care is complex and requires a team-wide dedication to excellence.

After successfully opening our flagship Institute in New York in 2022 and expanding to South Florida in 2024, we are now bringing the company experience to the West Coast with the launch of our Los Angeles Institute in late spring 2026.

About this role

The company is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead our Foundations group — the Platform, DevOps, and Data Engineering teams that the rest of the engineering organization is built on. Foundations exists to accelerate overall engineering throughput via the shared services, infrastructure, and data systems that let product teams ship for members and clinicians without reinventing authentication, caching, EMR data sync, pipelines, or deployments every time. You will own the technical strategy and roadmap across all three teams and be accountable for reliability, security, and delivery across the systems Foundations owns. This role directly manages the 12 member Foundations team, including 3 Tech Leads

Key Responsibilities

Ownership & Execution

• Own the health, technical direction, and output of the Foundations group (Platform, DevOps, and Data Engineering), including the shared services, infrastructure, and data systems the rest of engineering depends on.

• Maintain end-to-end accountability for complex, multi-team Foundations initiatives from concept through deployment: EMR integrations, the MySQL-to-Postgres migration, background jobs, feature flags, and data platform enhancements.

• Own the reliability, security, and operational health of platform, data, and cloud infrastructure, including SLOs, capacity planning, on-call rotation management, alerting, and incident response governance.

• Drive initiatives from definition through delivery, maintaining accountability for outcomes.

• Identify problems proactively and propose solutions without waiting to be asked.

Collaboration & Communication

• Serve as the primary escalation and request path into Foundations for the rest of the organization.

• Partner proactively with Product Engineering and Data & Analytics leadership to anticipate infrastructure needs early and build scalable solutions ahead of demand.

• Work cross-functionally with product, data, clinical, security, and executive stakeholders to deliver.

• Communicate early when blocked, working with colleagues to unblock the team.

• Drive and contribute to a culture of direct, constructive feedback.

Craft & Quality

• Own architectural direction across integration patterns, caching infrastructure, shared services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure to ensure consistency and reuse across teams.

• Act as the senior technical escalation point for complex engineering challenges, maintaining rigorous design standards for reliability, performance, and security through architecture and design reviews.

• Champion AI-assisted engineering workflows across Foundations; establishing the patterns, tooling, and guardrails that let teams use AI to accelerate delivery safely and consistently.

• Hold a high bar for the work: simple, maintainable, and built to last.

• Use AI tools actively to amplify output and accelerate delivery, and teach others how to do so.

Continuous Improvement

• Establish and promote engineering standards across the group, including architectural patterns, code conventions, and documentation best practices.

• Own hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development across Foundations, mentoring engineers and Tech Leads to a rising bar.

• Champion observability and telemetry standards (Datadog, Sentry, Mixpanel), and drive post-incident reviews and systemic improvements when things break.

• Create structures to enable the team to easily measure what we build.

• Share learnings, workflows, and effective patterns with the team and promote them sharing with one another.

• Raise the standard of the work over time.

Compensation: $230,000 - $290,000

Requirements

Must-Have

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant leadership experience managing engineering teams and Tech Leads/managers.

• Track record of developing talent and raising team performance over time.

• Demonstrated track record leading multiple teams across platform, infrastructure, or data domains in production, and driving technical strategy, architecture, and execution for complex, cross-functional initiatives.

• Strong systems-design background spanning backend infrastructure, platform reliability, data architecture, security/compliance, and cost optimization. Deep enough to lead architecture reviews and earn the technical respect of senior and staff engineers.

• Hands-on familiarity with our stack: TypeScript/Node.js, Google Cloud Platform and Terraform, and enterprise data warehousing and pipelines (Snowflake, dbt).

• Active, fluent use of AI tools in your own workflow, with a clear point of view on how an engineering organization should adopt them responsibly.

• Demonstrated ability to own outcomes end-to-end in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.

• Strong systems thinking - ability to see how decisions ripple across users, teams, and products.

• Evidence of developing and supporting a robust culture of feedback - including giving and receiving it.

• Ability to make decisions with incomplete information and bring teams along.

Nice-to-Have

• Prior experience in digital health or other regulated technology sectors (HIPAA, PHI, SOC 2, HITRUST).

• Direct experience integrating Electronic Health Record (EHR) platforms (e.g., Athena), health data infrastructure, or wearable API ecosystems.

• Experience establishing AI-assisted engineering workflows at a team or organization level.

Benefits

At the company, we are proud to offer every member of the company team:

• Excellent health and wellness benefits, fully covered by the company, effective date of hire

• OneMedical membership for employees & dependents, giving access to 24/7 virtual care

• Fertility & family planning

• Company-covered preventive health screenings through partner hospitals (calcium score)

• Fitness Perks, including Wellhub +

• 401k contributions and 4% match starting after 6 months

• Flexible Time Off

• Continuing medical education (CME) and CEU support for professional licensure