Director of Engineering

About Us:
SonarMD reimagines care for chronic diseases - starting with gastroenterology - by aligning incentives around the doctor-patient relationship. We combine AI technology with human support to detect clinical deterioration early and help specialists intervene before emergencies occur, reducing healthcare costs and improving lives. Learn more at SonarMD.com. 

The Role:
We're looking for a product focused Director of Engineering to lead and grow our small, AI-first product engineering team. This role is, first and foremost, about people and problems: building the team, raising its capability, and making sure every line of code we ship is tied to a real business outcome. 

You will work in close partnership with our Technical Lead (who owns architecture, design, and build-vs-buy decisions on the team) and our Product Leader (who owns product strategy, discovery, and roadmap). You'll be a true partner to both: bringing business context, organizational air cover, and a strong point of view, while letting each of them drive their own craft. 

Your own focus sits at the intersection of team and business: hiring and developing engineers, shaping how the team operates in an AI-first mode, hardening our deployment and compliance posture, and partnering with clinical, operational, and commercial leaders to turn the company's hardest problems into engineering work that actually moves things forward. 

This is a hands-on, high-impact role. You'll roll up your sleeves often. You'll wear multiple hats. And you'll help build the engineering foundation for SonarMD's long-term outcomes with health plan and provider partners.

----------

What You'll Do:
Build and Grow the Team: Lead a small, AI-first product engineering team. Hire thoughtfully, onboard well, and develop the engineers you have, raising the capability of the team over time through coaching, feedback, career growth, and the right kind of stretch work.

Partner with the Technical Lead: Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the Technical Lead, who owns architecture, design, and build-vs-buy decisions for the team. You bring business context, prioritization, and an outside perspective; they bring the technical depth and execution. Together you set direction the team can rally around.

Partner with the Product Leader: Partner closely with the Product Leader, who owns product strategy, discovery, and roadmap. You bring engineering reality—capacity, feasibility, risk, and operational and compliance considerations—into product decisions, and carry the team's perspective into prioritization conversations. Together you make sure the team is building the right thing, at the right time, with the right trade-offs.

Catalyze Engineering Solutions to Business Problems: Partner with clinical, operational, and commercial leaders to surface the highest-leverage problems for engineering to solve. Act as a catalyst - convening the right people, framing the problem clearly, and helping engineering and the business move forward together so that technical effort compounds into real outcomes.

Shape an AI-First Operating Model: Champion an AI-augmented way of working and help shape how AI shows up inside the SonarMD product. Set expectations for how the team uses AI tooling to ship faster, and partner with the Technical Lead on integrating LLMs, RAG, and agentic patterns into the product responsibly.

Stabilize Deployment Environments: Own the reliability and operability of our deployment environments at the leadership level. Make sure the team has the time, focus, and priority to stabilize CI/CD, infrastructure, and incident response—and unblock them when organizational support is what's needed.

Own Compliance & Audit Readiness: Partner with Security, Compliance, and Operations leadership to maintain and evolve our SOC 2 program, HIPAA controls, and other healthcare regulatory requirements. Drive audit readiness, evidence collection, access reviews, and remediation across engineering so audits are a non-event for the team.

Set the Quality and Ownership Bar: Reinforce a "No-QA" culture of ownership where engineers test their own work, monitor their own releases, and treat deployment as the start of their responsibility, not the end. Set the bar for quality that protects patient data and clinical workflows.

Lead with Clarity: Communicate engineering progress, risk, and trade-offs clearly to executives, clinical leaders, and cross-functional partners. Be the steady voice in the room when priorities shift or things get hard.

----------

What We're Looking For:
* 10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership role (Director, Engineering Manager, Head of Engineering, or similar) managing small, high-output product teams.

* You are a team builder first. You take real pride in hiring well, growing engineers, and creating a place where people do the best work of their careers. You can point to specific people whose capability you helped expand.

* You are a strong business collaborator and a natural catalyst. You speak the language of the business - cost of care, utilization, contract performance, ROI - and you are at your best when you're bringing people together to solve a real problem worth solving.

* You partner well with strong technical and product leaders. You know how to give a Tech Lead the room to own architecture and a Product Leader the room to own roadmap, while still being a real partner in both conversations—asking the sharp questions, bringing the engineering and business lens, and helping make the calls stick.

* You have deep experience operating in the healthcare space and a working command of HIPAA, PHI handling, and the realities of building software in a regulated environment. 

* You understand the operational weight of working with health plans, providers, and clinical data.

* You have led or materially contributed to SOC 2 (Type I and Type II) programs, HITRUST, or comparable audits - owning controls, evidence, and remediation rather than just attending the meetings.

* You are AI-fluent and AI-opinionated. You've led teams that integrated LLMs, RAG, or agentic patterns into a real production product, and you have strong views on where AI accelerates engineering work versus where it creates risk—especially around PHI.

* You are technically credible across the stack. You don't need to out-architect your Tech Lead, but you can reason about modern web stacks, services, data stores, and cloud infrastructure well enough to ask the right questions and make sound trade-off calls.

* You are comfortable with ambiguity. You can take a vague clinical or commercial goal, partner with the team to decompose it into work they can pick up, and start shipping value within weeks—not quarters.

* You are a strong communicator who can explain complex technical risk and trade-offs to founders, clinicians, health plan partners, and auditors with equal clarity.

* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 

Nice to Have:
* Experience at a Series A-C healthcare or value-based care startup, particularly in care management, chronic disease, or specialty care.

* Hands-on experience with FHIR, HL7, EHR integrations (Epic, Cerner), claims data, or other healthcare interoperability standards.

* Experience helping a team adopt AI-native patterns - RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, evaluation harnesses, and guardrails—for PHI-sensitive workloads.

* Track record of taking an engineering org through a major audit, certification, or compliance milestone (SOC 2 Type II, HITRUST, ISO 27001).

* Background in startup-to-scale transition environments, where you helped a team grow from a handful of engineers into a durable function.

* Experience with FinOps and managing cloud spend in a high-growth environment.