Principal Software Engineer, DAAS

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