Lead Principal Engineer — AI-Driven EDR Platform

athenahealth; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 164,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Commuter support

Employee assistance programs

Tuition assistance

Employee resource groups

Collaborative workspaces

Dog-friendly offices

Job summary

athenahealth is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for its Electronic Dental Records (EDR) platform in a hybrid Boston setting. You will define architectural direction, lead multi-team design efforts, and drive modernization from .NET Azure to Java AWS while ensuring scalable, reliable dental workflows.

You will mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, and help shape AI-powered capabilities within a regulated healthcare environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of engineering experience in a Product Engineering organization, with demonstrated progression into technical leadership.
• Deep backend expertise in Java and Spring Boot; track record of designing and shipping production‑grade distributed systems.
• Proven experience making and defending system-level architectural decisions — not just implementing within an existing architecture.
• Hands‑on, production‑level use of AI coding assistants or agentic dev tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) — with demonstrated ability to establish team‑wide norms around their use.
• Proven experience leading full‑stack development teams, including technical mentoring and design oversight.
• Experience defining engineering standards, code review practices, and testing strategy across multiple teams.
• Strong track record of technical mentorship — growing senior engineers into more independent, higher‑impact contributors.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, AWS services, Kubernetes, Terraform, Springboot. React is strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with healthcare domain concepts (RCM, claims processing, billing) is a strong plus.
• Experience working in and improving Agile delivery environments, ideally with a track record of adapting process for AI‑assisted delivery.

Responsibilities

• Own system-level architecture: Lead end-to-end architectural design across multiple product domains — claims processing, billing workflows, RCM — balancing long-term scalability, operational reliability, and delivery velocity.
• Define the AI-augmented engineering model: establish team-wide patterns, guardrails, and best practices for integrating AI coding assistants and LLM-assisted workflows into the SDLC.
• Drive spec-first culture at scale: ensure precise requirements, acceptance criteria, and design reviews across product, design, and engineering.
• Set the bar for AI output quality: establish standards for evaluating AI-generated code, tests, and designs; treat AI outputs as prototypes.
• Lead cross-team technical alignment: be the primary voice across engineering teams; resolve architectural trade-offs and dependencies.
• Prototype and productionize AI-powered capabilities: lead exploratory work on AI features for dev productivity and client-facing product capabilities.
• Evolve engineering practices: own code review norms, testing strategy, and delivery practices; drive durable improvements.
• Grow the engineering organization: mentor Senior and Staff engineers on architectural thinking and responsible AI use.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Architecture

Leadership

AI tooling

Kubernetes

Terraform

PostgreSQL

React

AWS

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Spring Boot

React

PostgreSQL

Job description

athenahealth is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for its Electronic Dental Records (EDR) platform in a hybrid Boston setting. You will define architectural direction, lead multi-team design efforts, and drive modernization from .NET Azure to Java AWS while ensuring scalable, reliable dental workflows.

You will mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, and help shape AI-powered capabilities within a regulated healthcare environment.