Software Architect, Insurance and Payment - athenaCollector

Description

The company builds IT products and services that remove daily obstacles for healthcare providers, so they can focus on their patients.

This is a director-level individual contributor role based in Boston, MA, with a hybrid work model. There are no direct reports, so your influence comes from technical credibility across organizations.

You will set architecture strategy for complex software and AI systems in healthcare, with a focus on modernizing insurance and payment areas and shaping platform decisions across several zones. Shared platform solutions are preferred over duplicated zone-specific builds.

You will lead large distributed systems and modernization work, and you will help put AI capabilities into production with attention to reliability, performance, security, maintainability, cost, and compliance.

Responsibilities

• Define target-state architecture and multi-quarter migration roadmaps for complex platform capabilities used by several teams in medical insurance and payment.
• Write architecture principles, technical standards, reference patterns, and decision records that engineering teams can follow.
• Study monolithic systems to understand how they work, document key details, spot pitfalls, and propose migration strategies and improvements.
• Design scalable, reliable, and performant distributed systems, with outcomes measured against SLOs, benchmarks, and operational results.
• Set up observability, incident response, runbook, and capacity planning practices that keep systems healthy and ready to operate.
• Assess event-driven and workflow orchestration options, including failure modes, resiliency patterns, and how consuming teams will interoperate.
• Work with engineering, product, security, and operations leaders to shape platform direction and modernization priorities, without formal authority.
• Review application, data, and integration designs against architecture standards, compliance requirements, and long-term platform goals.
• Lead tradeoff discussions across teams, weighing delivery speed, maintainability, cost, and risk.
• Architect, evaluate, and govern production AI capabilities, covering orchestration, tool calling, context and state handling, monitoring, and model risk controls.
• Stay hands-on with infrastructure as code, container platforms, CI/CD, and Java or a comparable modern language to prototype, review, and refine solutions.
• Help plan modernization of shared platform services and common capabilities.
• Take part in architecture review forums and design governance.
• Help define integration standards, versioning approaches, and contract management practices.
• Join incident reviews and turn findings into architecture improvements.
• Mentor engineers and architects through design feedback and technical discussion.
• Assess emerging technologies and recommend where they fit and where they do not.
• Contribute to long-range planning for platform investment and technical debt reduction.
• Help define security, privacy, auditability, and access-control patterns for regulated systems.

Requirements

• Typically 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant architecture ownership across multiple teams.
• A record of leading architecture strategy for complex, distributed software systems.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Java, AI tools, enterprise applications, Kubernetes, and modern LLM tools.
• A track record of producing target-state architectures and multi-quarter migration plans that delivered measurable results.
• Experience defining and running architecture principles, standards, reference patterns, and architecture decision records.
• Strong background in designing for scalability, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Deep knowledge of observability and SRE practice, including SLOs, alerting, incident management, and post-mortems.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, API design, contract versioning, and workflow orchestration.
• Hands-on work 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.
• Experience building systems in regulated environments, with attention to compliance, consent, data governance, auditability, and access control.
• Strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to drive adoption across teams and functions.

Conditions

Based in Boston, MA, with a hybrid work model.

Reports to the VP of engineering.

Individual contributor role with no direct reports.

Base pay for the role ranges from $216,000 to $366,000, and the final figure depends on job-related experience, relevant knowledge and skills, how the candidate compares to others in similar roles, and local market rates.

The company is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Benefits

• Health and financial benefits.
• Location-specific perks, which may include commuter support, an employee assistance program, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, collaborative workspaces, and dog-friendly offices in some locations.
• Flexibility to split time between office and remote work, supported by digital collaboration tools.
• Company events throughout the year, including book clubs, external speakers, and hackathons.
• Eligibility for an annual discretionary bonus plan, a variable compensation plan, and equity plans, depending on role eligibility.