The Role
Design and oversee scalable, FHIR-based healthcare data architectures for enterprise customers from discovery through implementation and post-go-live. Lead customer-facing design discussions, evaluate ingestion workflows, terminology mapping, performance, deployment, and technical trade-offs. Collaborate with product, engineering, QA, delivery, and technical account teams while documenting reusable architecture patterns and supporting escalations, implementation challenges, and product improvements.
Summary Generated by Built In
Working for a company like Smile Digital Health means supporting our mandate for #BetterGlobalHealth. We strive towards this goal every day, and the results can be seen in the impact of our innovative health data platform and data management solutions, which are used in over 20 countries. We were #19 on Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 Ranking for 2024!
Smile Digital Health makes it easy for healthcare stakeholders to collect and exchange data with our leading FHIR-based data liberation platform.
At its heart, the Smile platform enables people and organizations to better manage healthcare data. We help generate and liberate structured healthcare data to ensure effective delivery across care teams and health systems bringing #BetterGlobalHealth to patients everyday!
Apply today and find plenty of reasons to SMILE!
The Senior Solutions Architect – Implementations is a hands-on, customer-facing role responsible for designing scalable, standards-aligned healthcare data solutions using Smile Digital Health’s platform. You’ll partner closely with enterprise clients during discovery and early design, often when requirements are incomplete, and help guide them toward the right architecture.
Success in this role requires more than technical knowledge. It’s about the art of asking the right questions, helping customers uncover what they don’t know, and shaping practical, future-proof solutions based on Smile best practices, regulatory frameworks, and your past experience. You’ll need to be curious, quick to learn, enthusiastic, and committed to delivering the best outcome, even in fast-moving or ambiguous situations.
This role goes beyond design. You’ll maintain architectural oversight throughout the implementation and post-go-live phases, ensuring the solution continues to work as expected, adjusting designs as needed, and supporting performance tuning, edge cases, and real-world constraints. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams, product, engineering, delivery, and TAMs, to turn vision into execution.
Responsibilities:
- Lead architectural design and solutioning during discovery and early implementation phases, working directly with healthcare customers to surface unknowns, ask the right questions, and co-design scalable, standards-aligned solutions.
- Provide ongoing architectural oversight and hands-on technical guidance (if needed) throughout the full implementation lifecycle and post-go-live, ensuring the solution remains aligned with Smile’s best practices, technical standards, and product capabilities.
- Evaluate customer-specific requirements and make technical recommendations around performance tuning, ingestion workflows, bundle design, and terminology mapping.
- Collaborate regularly with internal teams, including Product, Engineering, QA, Agile Leads, Solution Architects, and Technical Account Managers, to resolve architectural questions, validate patterns, and provide feedback that shapes future product improvements.
- Take ownership of evolving or refactoring designs when new constraints, blockers, or learnings emerge during delivery (e.g., scalability issues, deployment friction, real-time ingest gaps).
- Actively participate in customer-facing meetings, design reviews, retrospectives, and change discussions; support technical communication during escalations and decision points.
- Contribute to Smile’s internal architecture review boards, design documentation, reusable delivery assets, and solution playbooks to help scale implementation excellence across teams.
- Stay current with Smile’s product roadmap, technical stack, and regulatory mandates (e.g., CMS interoperability requirements); demonstrate curiosity and initiative in learning new tools and approaches.
Requirements:
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, technical consulting, or solution architecture roles, ideally with hands-on experience supporting complex healthcare implementations.
- Proven ability to lead customer-facing architecture and design discussions, especially with payer, provider, or government-aligned healthcare organizations.
- Demonstrated experience designing solutions involving real-time data ingestion technologies such as Kafka, Camel, Pulsar, and implementing FHIR-based data workflows.
- Strong understanding of clinical data modeling and terminology mapping (e.g., SNOMED CT, RxNorm, LOINC), including their application across ingestion, transformation, and API exposure layers.
- Experience with cloud-native architecture and deployment in AWS, Azure, or GCP using Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes.
- Skilled in identifying technical trade-offs and adapting solution designs in response to new constraints or emerging information during delivery.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to translate complex designs for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills with cross-functional teams including product, engineering, QA, and delivery.
- Comfortable working in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with evolving requirements, shifting priorities, and in-flight blockers.
- Proficiency with solution diagramming and design tools such as Lucidchart (or equivalent) to communicate architectural decisions and data flows clearly.
Nice to Haves:
- Familiarity with U.S. healthcare regulations, such as CMS interoperability mandates (e.g., 9115-F, 0057-F), HIPAA, and general data access governance.
- Prior experience with Smile CDR or other FHIR server platforms
- Knowledge of the Inferno test suite, NIST validators, or similar conformance tools
- TOGAF or equivalent architectural certification
Some of the benefits we offer:
* Remote Work Environment
* Flexible Time Away From Work Policy including PTO, Personal and Sick Days
* Competitive Salary and Health/Medical Benefits
* RRSP/TFSA/401K Employee Contribution
* Life and Disability
* Employee Assistance Program
* FHIR Study Program and Skillsoft Learning
* Super HAPI Fun Club
Smile's core values include respect, inclusion, embracing our differences, and celebrating shared values because our people are the foundation of our success. We are big on creating a sense of belonging and empowering each other to bring our authentic selves to work. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace that values diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We welcome and encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply. Candidates are encouraged to inform us if they wish to discuss or require accommodations during interviews or while working at Smile.
Skills Required
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, technical consulting, or solution architecture
- Experience supporting complex healthcare implementations
- Ability to lead customer-facing architecture and design discussions
- Experience with payer, provider, or government-aligned healthcare organizations
- Experience with real-time data ingestion technologies such as Kafka, Camel, or Pulsar
- Experience implementing FHIR-based data workflows
- Understanding of clinical data modeling and terminology mapping, including SNOMED CT, RxNorm, and LOINC
- Experience with cloud-native architecture and deployment using AWS, Azure, or GCP, Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes
- Ability to identify technical trade-offs and adapt solution designs during delivery
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Strong interpersonal and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Comfort working in fast-paced, ambiguous environments
- Proficiency with solution diagramming and design tools such as Lucidchart
- Familiarity with U.S. healthcare regulations, CMS interoperability mandates, HIPAA, and data access governance
- Experience with Smile CDR or other FHIR server platforms
- Knowledge of the Inferno test suite, NIST validators, or similar conformance tools
- TOGAF or equivalent architectural certification
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The Company
What We Do
Smile Digital Health (doing business as Smile CDR Inc.) specializes in delivering fast, secure, compliant data infrastructures as a service to enable and empower interconnectivity for data-intensive sectors such as healthcare. We are a solutions platform helping organizations like governments, researchers, health systems, healthcare providers, and app developers build connected health solutions and products by leveraging our core expertise in health data and HL7 FHIR. Our flagship product, Smile CDR, is the world’s first FHIR-based clinical data repository (CDR) as a service. Smile CDR is a high performance and secure solution built on the principles of Privacy by Design. Flexibility is a hallmark of the service as it can be hosted in the cloud or on-premises depending on your needs. The design was strongly influenced by real-world experience in both the jurisdictional and organizational setting. Smile CDR provides a rich set of features and capabilities including: -Multiple FHIR versions -FHIR Profiles -Full text indexing of clinical records -Type ahead search functionality -FHIR, HL7v2 and custom ETL for data input -Federated identity and identity provider functionality -International character locale support -Terminology services -Auditing -Smart on FHIR support -Rapid deployment -Extensive administrative tooling Leveraging more than 40 years of experience in building enterprise-class systems, our team includes experts in building integrated healthcare systems including FHIR-based solutions such as HAPI, e-prescriptions and other e-health solutions. We were motivated by the need to improve upon existing options for sharing health data within and across organizations. Smile CDR is the maintainer of HAPI FHIR, the prevailing open source reference implementation of FHIR worldwide
