Associate Director, Software Engineering

Company Description

Guardant Health is a leading precision oncology company focused on helping conquer cancer globally through use of its proprietary tests, vast data sets and advanced analytics. The Guardant Health oncology platform leverages capabilities to drive commercial adoption, improve patient clinical outcomes and lower healthcare costs across all stages of the cancer care continuum. Guardant Health has commercially launched Guardant360®, Guardant360 CDx, Guardant360 TissueNext™, Guardant360 Response™, and GuardantOMNI® tests for advanced stage cancer patients, and Guardant Reveal™ for early-stage cancer patients. The Guardant Health screening portfolio, including the Shield™ test, aims to address the needs of individuals eligible for cancer screening.

Job Description

About the Role:

We are seeking a strategic and technically strong leader to join our Software Engineering team as an Associate Director, Software Engineering. This role will oversee the development of customer-facing digital experiences, including physician and patient portals, a physician mobile app, and EMR integrations with systems like Epic, OncoEMR, and hospital networks.

This individual will lead and mentor engineering managers across teams in Palo Alto and India, drive the technical vision for intuitive, high-performing, and scalable physician-facing digital tools, and ensure seamless integration with healthcare ecosystems.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Leadership & Strategy

• Lead, mentor, and scale a distributed engineering team across Palo Alto and India, ensuring high performance and alignment with Guardant Health’s mission.
• Provide technical and strategic direction for customer-facing digital experiences, ensuring seamless interactions between physicians, patients, and healthcare data.
• Drive user-centric design and engineering to improve physician workflows, mobile usability, and real-time access to insights.
• Promote engineering excellence, best practices, and a culture of continuous improvement in software development, DevOps, and automation.

Technology & Execution

• Oversee the development of physician and patient portals and a physician mobile app, ensuring a seamless, consumer-grade user experience.
• Drive EMR integration efforts with platforms like Epic, OncoEMR, and hospital networks, ensuring robust data exchange and interoperability.
• Architect and scale cloud-native solutions, leveraging AWS, Kubernetes, and microservices architectures.
• Establish and maintain strong CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous deployment with a focus on test automation and reliability.
• Ensure compliance with healthcare regulations

Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Partner with engineering leaders, product managers, UX designers, commercial and clinical stakeholders to drive innovation in customer-facing digital solutions.
• Work closely with Guardant Health’s leadership, ensuring cross-functional alignment and strategic execution.
• Foster an inclusive, diverse, and collaborative culture within engineering teams.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years leading teams in a managerial or director-level role.
• Proven experience managing engineering managers and leading distributed teams across geographies.
• Strong background in Full Stack or Backend development, with expertise in Java, React, RESTful APIs, and microservices.
• Experience building cloud-native applications in a containerized environment (Kubernetes, AWS preferred).
• Deep understanding of EMR/EHR integrations (Epic, OncoEMR, HL7, FHIR).
• Strong customer-first mindset, with experience in delivering engaging and scalable digital experiences.
• Strong CI/CD mindset, emphasizing test automation, DevOps, and continuous deployment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across technical and non-technical teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience in the Life Sciences, Healthcare, or HealthTech industry.
• Familiarity with healthcare data security standards.

Additional Information

Hybrid Work Model: At Guardant Health, we have defined days for in-person/onsite collaboration and work-from-home days for individual-focused time. All U.S. employees who live within 50 miles of a Guardant facility will be required to be onsite on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. We have found aligning our scheduled in-office days allows our teams to do the best work and creates the focused thinking time our innovative work requires. At Guardant, our work model has created flexibility for better work-life balance while keeping teams connected to advance our