Software Engineering Director - eCOA - Evinova

Description

The company is a health-tech business that uses data and digital products to improve health outcomes across the life sciences sector, building digital solutions that help healthcare work better for more people.

Its work sits where healthcare, technology, data and analytics meet, changing how clinical research is run, how care is delivered and how patients experience care.

The Product Engineering group is made of cross-functional squads that build digital products for patients and healthcare providers in clinical trials worldwide. Teams ship on quarterly program increments using agile methods.

The software team is considered one of the strongest in health tech, with deep technical and domain skill.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not a traditional management one. You write and review code, make architecture calls in pull requests and lead by building alongside your team.

You will own the technical direction and delivery of the eCOA product area and lead a multi-squad engineering organization.

A large share of your week is spent in the codebase, on reviews, pairing, evaluating AI-assisted development workflows and keeping the architecture scalable. The rest goes to developing people, working with other functions and setting technical strategy.

You should be the strongest technical voice on your product area, able to challenge an architecture decision, catch problems in code review and prototype fixes to unblock the team.

This role is not a people-management job where you leave the code behind. If you have not written or reviewed code in the past month, it is not a fit.

It is not a project management role. Product Owners and delivery support handle process coordination, while you own the technical how, not the timeline.

It is not a box-ticking exercise in AI adoption. You need to have changed your own development workflow with AI tools and be able to lead others through the same change.

Responsibilities

• Spend at least 50% of your time on hands-on technical work.
• Review pull requests regularly, give detailed code-level feedback and hold every squad to the quality bar.
• Own the architecture decisions for the eCOA platform, covering API design, data models, service boundaries and infrastructure.
• Write production code, focusing on complex or foundational components where your skill speeds the team up.
• Pair with engineers on hard problems and treat those sessions as coaching.
• Bring AI-assisted development tools into daily work as a multiplier, and set team conventions for AI code generation, prompt engineering and automated testing.
• Set and enforce technical standards for testing, CI/CD pipeline health, observability and deployment.
• Make sure engineers take full ownership of AI-generated code, with the same review, testing and accountability as code they write by hand.
• Keep up with fast-moving AI-assisted development and turn new practices into practical improvements for the team.
• Evaluate and build AI capabilities into the eCOA product, such as intelligent data capture, adaptive questionnaire logic and personalized patient experience.
• Lead, mentor and grow the multi-squad engineering organization, and help squad leads become strong technical leaders.
• Personally run technical interviews and judge whether candidates can build, not just describe.
• Build a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety, and be open about technical debt and tradeoffs.
• Measure performance against clear expectations based on engineering output and quality, not process compliance alone.
• Work closely with Product Owners and product leadership to turn clinical and customer requirements into technical plans that are feasible, scalable and compliant with regulations.
• Act as the senior engineering representative for one of the company's clinical trial products in North America, and represent engineering to key stakeholders.
• Be the main engineering contact for the Product team, bringing technical input to strategy, roadmap, prioritization and key customer or business needs.
• Deliver against quarterly program increments with predictable, high-quality output, balancing product priorities against quality, scalability and long-term platform health.
• Work across the product and engineering organizations for trial products to align technical direction and reuse shared platform capabilities across squads.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent shown through professional experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including a solid record of building and shipping production systems.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams such as squads or chapters while staying hands-on with code.
• Deep proficiency in at least one of the core stacks: React or React Native for frontend, Node.js or Java for backend, or AWS cloud services.
• Proven ability to make sound architecture decisions across frontend, backend and infrastructure.
• Daily, hands-on use of AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor or similar in your own coding.
• Working knowledge of agile delivery frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban or SAFe, applied in real practice rather than only in theory.
• Desired: experience building or deploying AI or ML features in production, including agentic AI systems or LLM integrations.
• Desired: experience developing or delivering electronic Clinical Outcome Assessments (eCOA) or patient-facing clinical trial software.
• Desired: familiarity with GxP, SaMD validation or regulated software development processes.
• Desired: experience with remote patient monitoring (RPM) solutions, including patient-reported data and clinician-facing visualizations.
• Desired: open-source contributions or a visible record of technical thought leadership, such as blog posts, conference talks or published architecture decisions.
• Desired: clinical research domain experience.

Conditions

Hybrid role, with employees expected in the office 3 days per week.

Can be based in Gaithersburg, Maryland; Durham, North Carolina; or Boston, Massachusetts.

Annual base pay ranges from $166,000 to $225,000 USD. Actual pay depends on factors including market location, job-related knowledge, skills and experience.

At-will position. The company may change base pay and any other discretionary pay or compensation program at any time, for reasons including individual or team performance and market factors.

Posted 06-Oct-2026. Closing date 10-Dec-2026.

The company is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, inclusion and a workplace free from discrimination, and it provides accommodation for people with disabilities during recruitment on request.

Benefits

• Short-term incentive bonus opportunity.
• Eligibility to join the company's equity-based long-term incentive program.
• Qualified retirement plan (401(k)).
• Paid vacation and holidays, plus paid leave.
• Health coverage covering medical, prescription drug, dental and vision, under the terms of each applicable plan.
• Full details of the benefit plans are provided with a job offer.