Director of Engineering

About the role

This is a Director of Engineering opportunity with a fast-growing US healthtech business that partners with employers to steer members towards higher-quality doctors and lower-cost care. The role leads Financial Incentives Engineering, the function responsible for paying members when they choose better care. That means ingesting claims and eligibility data from third-party administrators, adjudicating claims against benefit rules, accumulating member benefits and moving funds through payments and treasury, all while handling sensitive health and personal data at high and growing volume. The role reports to the CTO. You’ll own the function’s correctness, reliability, security and pace of improvement, along with a multi-year roadmap. You’ll lead Engineering Managers and senior engineers, set validation standards and a clear definition of done, and stay hands-on in design reviews, code and incidents. You’ll make AI-assisted development the default and push towards more autonomous work with guardrails, move the backend towards event-contract boundaries so teams can ship independently, and make sure no claim is dropped or paid twice. You’ll also hire and develop managers, shape the organisation structure and partner with Product, Finance, Operations and payment partners. The ideal candidate will have 10+ years’ experience building and operating high-scale, high-reliability backend systems, ideally involving large data volumes or money movement, and 5+ years leading engineering teams including managers. Depth in distributed systems and cloud (event-driven design, idempotency, fault tolerance, AWS), experience with regulated health and financial data, and reconciliation-first design instincts are expected. This is a hands-on leadership position based in New York City, three days a week in the office (Tuesday to Thursday), suited to someone with a strong ownership mindset and a clear view on AI-native engineering. We're looking for someone curious, pragmatic, and eager to work across the stack with a small senior team. You'll own end-to-end delivery of major features, influence architecture, and mentor engineers.

What you'll do

• Ship customer-facing features on a weekly cadence.
• Partner with design and product on scoping and trade-offs.
• Drive technical quality through review, testing, and docs.
• Mentor one or two engineers on your team.

Requirements