Director, Engineering

heartflowinc; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Heartflow seeks a Principal Architect to own the technical strategy for platform performance and international expansion. You will lead a distributed engineering team, define latency, throughput, and scalability targets, and align architecture with GDPR, data residency, and regional compliance across markets.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive cross-border collaboration, and report architectural trade-offs to executives, ensuring the Heartflow platform scales efficiently for global adoption.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in industry with leadership impact.
• Experience as principal architect or equivalent.
• Healthcare/medical software experience preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy for platform performance and scalability.
• Lead offshore team coordination and delivery across geographies.
• Define regulatory, data residency, and localization requirements in architecture.
• Establish cross-team standards, observability, and risk mitigation.
• Mentor senior engineers and communicate strategy to executives.

Skills

Architectural leadership

Distributed systems

Regulatory compliance

Cloud architecture

Mentor/people management

Cross-border collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Job description

Heartflow is a medical technology company advancing the diagnosis and management of coronary artery disease, the #1 cause of death worldwide, using cutting-edge technology. The flagship product-an AI-driven, non-invasive cardiac test supported by the ACC/AHA Chest Pain Guidelines called the Heartflow FFR CT Analysis-provides a color-coded, 3D model of a patient's coronary arteries indicating the impact blockages have on blood flow to the heart. Heartflow is the first AI-driven non-invasive integrated heart care solution across the CCTA pathway that helps clinicians identify stenoses in the coronary arteries (RoadMap™Analysis), assess coronary blood flow (FFR CT Analysis), and characterize and quantify coronary atherosclerosis (Plaque Analysis). Our pipeline of products is growing and so is our team; join us in helping to revolutionize precision heartcare.

Heartflow is a publicly traded company (HTFL) that has received international recognition for exceptional strides in healthcare innovation, is supported by medical societies around the world, cleared for use in the US, UK, Europe, Japan and Canada, and has been used for more than 750,000 patients worldwide.

We are seeking a Principal Architect to own the technical strategy for platform performance and international expansion. In this role, you will define how the Heartflow clinical platform scales, making it faster and more efficient at growing case volume, and architecting it to operate across new geographies with the data residency, regulatory, and localization requirements each market demands.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role that pairs architecture ownership with direct people management. You will lead a dedicated offshore engineering team based in Eastern Europe, setting the architectural direction and then building and leading the team that executes against it. Success requires deep systems expertise alongside the leadership skills to grow a distributed, cross-border engineering group.

Job Responsibilities

• Performance Architecture: Own the end-to-end performance strategy for the clinical platform - define latency, throughput, and scalability targets; establish benchmarking and profiling practices; and drive architectural changes that measurably improve case processing time and cost per case.
• International Architecture: Architect the platform for multi-region operation, including regional cloud deployment topology, data residency and sovereignty controls, failover and availability design, and the abstractions that let a single codebase serve multiple markets.
• Regulatory & Data Residency: Partner with Regulatory, Quality, Security, and Legal to translate GDPR, in-country data residency mandates, and market-specific clearance requirements (EU, UK, Japan, and new markets) into concrete architectural requirements and controls.
• Localization & Regional Fit: Define the architecture for internationalization - language and locale support, units and clinical reporting conventions, and regional integration differences across EHR, PACS, and imaging workflows.
• Offshore Team Leadership: Directly manage and grow a dedicated offshore engineering team in Eastern Europe, owning work allocation, technical quality, delivery accountability, onboarding, and individual development across time zones.
• Distributed Delivery Model: Establish the operating model for effective onshore/offshore collaboration - documentation standards, design review practices, handoff protocols, and communication rhythms that make a cross-border team productive.
• Cross-Team Standards: Define, enforce, and evolve architecture patterns, engineering best practices, and tooling standards for performance and multi-region concerns that scale across all engineering teams.
• Observability: Establish the instrumentation, telemetry, and SLO framework needed to understand and defend platform performance in every region we operate in.
• Risk Management: Identify performance, scalability, and expansion-related technology risks and dependencies early, and establish mitigation plans with clear owners and timelines.
• Technical Multiplier: Mentor senior and staff engineers across onshore and offshore teams; raise the architectural bar organization-wide through design reviews, written guidance, and hands-on partnership.
• Executive Communication: Represent platform architecture in cross-functional leadership forums; communicate technical strategy, trade-offs, and expansion readiness clearly to executive and non-technical stakeholders across Product, Strategy, Operations, Commercial, and Regulatory.
• Compliance: Ensure all engineering practices across your scope adhere to FDA regulations, HIPAA, and applicable international data protection standards for medical software.

Qualifications required

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline, or equivalent experience.
• Experience: 15+ years of relevant industry experience, including significant time in principa