Senior Member of Technical Staff – SMTS
athenahealth · Chennai
Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Role Summary
The Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS) will join the Dev Portal team within athenahealth’s Chennai R&D Internal Developer Platform organization. This role is for an experienced full-stack software engineer with a strong platform engineering mindset who is passionate about improving the developer experience at scale.
The SMTS will help design and build platform capabilities that simplify how engineering teams discover, build, integrate, and operate software. This role partners with engineering, product, architecture, and platform leaders to solve complex developer productivity problems and translate them into scalable, reusable platform solutions.
The ideal candidate has strong software engineering fundamentals, high learnability, and the ability to operate across a rapidly evolving technology landscape. The role requires comfort working across frontend applications, backend services, APIs, cloud-native technologies, integrations, and developer tooling while providing technical direction for complex initiatives.
Team Summary
The Developer Portal team is part of athenahealth’s Internal Developer Platform organization and is focused on building a cohesive and scalable developer experience for engineering teams.
Backstage is one of the foundational technologies in this ecosystem, providing a centralized experience for developers to discover services, APIs, documentation, engineering standards, and platform capabilities. The team builds platform products and reusable engineering capabilities that reduce developer cognitive load, improve engineering efficiency, and enable teams to deliver software safely and effectively at scale.
Essential Job Responsibilities
- Lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable Internal Developer Platform capabilities that simplify the developer experience and address common engineering needs across teams.
- Own complex platform initiatives from problem definition and architecture through implementation, production rollout, observability, and continuous improvement.
- Design and implement self-service engineering workflows, golden paths, software templates, platform APIs, and reusable abstractions that reduce developer cognitive load and dependencies on platform teams.
- Build full-stack platform solutions spanning modern web applications, backend services, APIs, integrations, data stores, and cloud-native environments.
- Define and evolve platform standards, engineering guardrails, design patterns, and best practices that enable teams to build and deliver software consistently and safely.
- Drive cloud-native platform solutions leveraging Kubernetes, AWS, containers, and modern infrastructure patterns, with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, performance, and maintainability.
- Evaluate architectural alternatives and technical trade-offs, establish technical direction, and drive alignment for initiatives spanning multiple systems and engineering teams.
- Improve developer productivity by simplifying and streamlining workflows across the software development lifecycle, from development and source control through build, testing, deployment, observability, and operations.
- Proactively identify and eliminate developer friction across source control, CI/CD, testing, deployment, observability, governance, and platform consumption.
- Partner closely with engineering teams to understand developer pain points and translate them into scalable platform capabilities rather than one-off solutions.
- Use platform adoption signals, engineering effectiveness metrics, and developer feedback to identify opportunities and continuously improve the developer experience.
- Build robust integrations with engineering systems including source control, CI/CD platforms, quality engineering tools, observability platforms, cloud infrastructure, documentation systems, and other SDLC technologies.
- Provide technical leadership for the development and evolution of Backstage as a key foundation of athenahealth’s Developer Portal and Internal Developer Platform ecosystem.
- Design and build Backstage plugins, platform integrations, software catalog capabilities, APIs, software templates, and developer self-service experiences.
- Drive capabilities around software metadata management, service discovery, software ownership visibility, catalog governance, and operational excellence.
- Evolve the Developer Portal into a cohesive experience for discovering services, APIs, documentation, engineering standards, platform capabilities, and developer workflows.
- Ensure Backstage integrates effectively with authoritative engineering systems while providing developers with a consistent discovery, aggregation, ownership, and navigation experience.
- Provide technical leadership for complex initiatives, bringing structure to ambiguous problems and driving solutions from concept through production.
- Establish and promote strong engineering practices around architecture, code quality, automated testing, observability, security, operational readiness, and production ownership.
- Mentor engineers through architecture and design discussions, code reviews, technical problem solving, and knowledge sharing.
- Collaborate across engineering, product, architecture, security, and platform teams to identify dependencies, influence technical decisions, and deliver cross-functional platform capabilities.
- Stay current with evolving technologies and engineering practices, evaluating where new approaches can meaningfully improve the platform and developer experience.
Additional Job Responsibilities
- Contribute to platform strategy, roadmap planning, and technical prioritization.
- Support adoption of platform capabilities through documentation, enablement, and developer engagement.
- Help define metrics and feedback loops that measure platform value and developer experience.
- Participate in incident response, operational reviews, and continuous improvement efforts for platform services.
- Explore and apply AI-assisted capabilities and intelligent automation where they can meaningfully simplify developer workflows and improve engineering productivity.
- Perform other duties as assigned in support of team and organizational objectives.
Expected Education & Experience
- 6 to 8 years of engineering experience.
- Strong experience designing and building distributed systems and cloud-native applications.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design, API design, testing, debugging, performance, reliability, and maintainable software development.
- Hands-on experience building applications and services using technologies such as TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, Java, or comparable modern programming languages.
- Experience building modern web applications using React or comparable frontend frameworks.
- Strong experience designing and integrating REST APIs, backend services, and distributed systems.
- Experience with AI-powered development platforms, coding assistants, agents, or MCP-based integrations.
- Experience working with relational databases such as PostgreSQL and designing appropriate application data models.
- Experience building and operating applications in cloud-native environments using technologies such as AWS, Kubernetes, and containers.
- Understanding of modern CI/CD and software delivery practices and experience working with platforms such as Harness, Jenkins, Bitbucket, GitHub, or equivalent technologies.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to influence technical decisions and work effectively across engineering teams.
About athenahealth
Our vision: In an industry that becomes more complex by the day, we stand for simplicity. We offer IT solutions and expert services that eliminate the daily hurdles preventing healthcare providers from focusing entirely on their patients — powered by our vision to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Our company culture: Our talented employees — or athenistas, as we call ourselves — spark the innovation and passion needed to accomplish our vision. We are a diverse group of dreamers and do-ers with unique knowledge, expertise, backgrounds, and perspectives. We unite as mission-driven problem-solvers with a deep desire to achieve our vision and make our time here count. Our award-winning culture is built around shared values of inclusiveness, accountability, and support.
Our DEI commitment: Our vision of accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all requires addressing the inequities that stand in the way. That's one reason we prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in every aspect of our business, from attracting and sustaining a diverse workforce to maintaining an inclusive environment for athenistas, our partners, customers and the communities where we work and serve.
What we can do for you:
Along with health and financial benefits, athenistas enjoy perks specific to each location, including commuter support, employee assistance programs, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, and collaborative workspaces — some offices even welcome dogs.
We also encourage a better work-life balance for athenistas with our flexibility. While we know in-office collaboration is critical to our vision, we recognize that not all work needs to be done within an office environment, full-time. With consistent communication and digital collaboration tools, athenahealth enables employees to find a balance that feels fulfilling and productive for each individual situation.
In addition to our traditional benefits and perks, we sponsor events throughout the year, including book clubs, external speakers, and hackathons. We provide athenistas with a company culture based on learning, the support of an engaged team, and an inclusive environment where all employees are valued.
Learn more about our culture and benefits here: athenahealth.com/careers