Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Role summary
We are looking for a Principal Engineer who would work on transforming the way athenahealth delivers and operates database services by designing scalable, resilient platform capabilities for Managed PostgreSQL. This Principal Member of Technical Staff will provide senior technical leadership across platform architecture, engineering practices, and operational excellence. This is a hybrid role based in Boston, MA and reports to an Engineering Manager in the Data as a Service team.
Team summary
The Managed Postgres Service team provides tools and integrations that enable athenahealth engineering teams to build features backed by PostgreSQL without needing to reinvent core database platform capabilities. The team drives the architectural evolution of the Managed PostgreSQL platform with a mission to abstract database complexity and deliver a Golden Path—a standardized, reusable set of patterns and automation that hundreds of services can adopt safely and efficiently.
This platform includes the design, development, and deployment of foundational logical components within the database ecosystem. The team also scales the platform to support a large fleet of Amazon RDS instances, while maintaining the supporting libraries, deployment engines, and automation frameworks that enable application teams to remain self-service within enterprise-grade best-practice guardrails. In this PMTS role, you will help shape technical direction, improve platform reliability and performance, modernize infrastructure automation, and strengthen end-to-end engineering workflows (from schema/migrations to CI/CD and observability).
Essential Job Responsibilities
Design and architect the evolution of the Managed PostgreSQL “Golden Path,” ensuring security, reliability, scalability, and maintainability across a large service fleet.
Lead platform and systems engineering for database lifecycle workflows, including schema design, migrations (Liquibase/Flyway), and safe rollout strategies.
Develop and maintain core platform components using Java/Spring and Python, collaborating on clean APIs, robust tooling, and well-tested services.
Build and enhance CI/CD and pipeline orchestration workflows to support consistent releases, automated validation, and high-confidence deployments.
Improve database performance and correctness through deep PostgreSQL expertise, including schema/DDL strategy, query and index tuning, and operational safeguards.
Advance observability by integrating and standardizing monitoring, logging, and tracing approaches to enable rapid detection, diagnosis, and remediation.
Integrate AI into engineering workflows by evaluating practical AI-assisted opportunities (for example, assisting with migration planning, alert triage support, or documentation generation from platform artifacts), assessing risks/limits, and guiding implementation decisions to amplify human judgment in platform delivery.
Additional Job Responsibilities
Mentor senior engineers and peers through design reviews, architecture guidance, and technical deep-dives.
Partner with product and platform stakeholders to translate reliability and scalability goals into engineering roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
Drive technical standards for database design, migration safety, deployment practices, and operational runbooks.
Collaborate on incident response preparedness by strengthening failure mode understanding and recovery playbooks.
Review and improve engineering proposals related to platform changes, including migration/maturity plans.
Support recruitment and onboarding by contributing to interview guides, technical screens, and early ramp plans.
Assess and reduce operational risk by improving validation gates, rollback strategies, and change-management processes.
Expected Education & Experience
10+ years of progressively responsible experience in software and systems engineering with a strong focus on database/platform capabilities.
Proven expertise in PostgreSQL including schema design, migrations, performance tuning, and operational best practices.
Hands-on experience with Java/Spring and Python for building platform services and engineering tooling.
Demonstrated infrastructure automation experience with Terraform and AWS (including ECS/RDS/Aurora).
Containerization and orchestration experience with Docker and EKS.
Experience with database migration tooling such as Liquibase and/or Flyway, including safe release patterns.
Experience building/managing CI/CD and pipeline orchestration workflows that support repeatable, reliable deployments.
Systems thinking and architecture skills, including cross-layer design from application requirements through infrastructure and operations.
Large-scale Platform mindset experience preferred.
Expected Compensation
$164,000 - $280,000The base salary range shown reflects the full range for this role from minimum to maximum. At athenahealth, base pay depends on multiple factors, including job-related experience, relevant knowledge and skills, how your qualifications compare to others in similar roles, and geographical market rates. Base pay is only one part of our competitive Total Rewards package - depending on role eligibility, we offer both short and long-term incentives by way of an annual discretionary bonus plan, variable compensation plan, and equity plans.
About athenahealth
Our vision: In an industry that becomes more complex by the day, we stand for simplicity. We offer IT solutions and expert services that eliminate the daily hurdles preventing healthcare providers from focusing entirely on their patients — powered by our vision to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Our company culture: Our talented employees — or athenistas, as we call ourselves — spark the innovation and passion needed to accomplish our vision. We are a diverse group of dreamers and do-ers with unique knowledge, expertise, backgrounds, and perspectives. We unite as mission-driven problem-solvers with a deep desire to achieve our vision and make our time here count. Our award-winning culture is built around shared values of inclusiveness, accountability, and support.
Our DEI commitment: Our vision of accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all requires addressing the inequities that stand in the way. That's one reason we prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in every aspect of our business, from attracting and sustaining a diverse workforce to maintaining an inclusive environment for athenistas, our partners, customers and the communities where we work and serve.
What we can do for you:
Along with health and financial benefits, athenistas enjoy perks specific to each location, including commuter support, employee assistance programs, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, and collaborative workspaces — some offices even welcome dogs.
We also encourage a better work-life balance for athenistas with our flexibility. While we know in-office collaboration is critical to our vision, we recognize that not all work needs to be done within an office environment, full-time. With consistent communication and digital collaboration tools, athenahealth enables employees to find a balance that feels fulfilling and productive for each individual situation.
In addition to our traditional benefits and perks, we sponsor events throughout the year, including book clubs, external speakers, and hackathons. We provide athenistas with a company culture based on learning, the support of an engaged team, and an inclusive environment where all employees are valued.
Learn more about our culture and benefits here: athenahealth.com/careers
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