Director, Engineering

DrFirst Inc.

1d•Remote

About The Position

DrFirst's medication adherence platform, RxInform, receives prescriptions from EHR and pharmacy partners, delivers SMS engagement to patients, and runs experiment-driven workflows that help patients start and stay on therapy. The product pairs a patient-facing web experience with an admin console used by internal operators and partners, backed by services running in AWS and serving hundreds of thousands of patients every day. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will spend the majority of your time in the code, building significant functionality, reviewing pull requests, and pairing on architectural decisions. The remainder of your time supports coordination: aligning with product on requirements and release readiness, partnering with QA on automation strategy, and removing technical blockers for the engineers on your teams. You will report to Chris Nichols, Vice President of Engineering, Patient Solutions.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years formally managing engineers, with ownership of hiring and performance management.
Senior-engineer-level depth in Java and server-side technologies. You can read a Java codebase, reason about plugin-based service frameworks, DynamoDB access patterns, SQS queues, and Hibernate/JPA, and spot issues in PRs without being walked through the architecture.
Strong Angular experience. You have shipped production Angular apps, can read Angular 16+ code, follow an Nx workspace, and speak credibly about RxJS, SSR, component architecture, and state management.
Track record of raising unit and integration test coverage on a real codebase, beyond advocacy in meetings.
Experience driving QA automation integration into an engineering workflow, including shift-left testing and meaningful end-to-end coverage.
Experience owning the technical side of a release process for a Kubernetes-deployed, multi-service product, including CI/CD pipelines, blue/green and rolling update patterns, and accountability for production incidents and retrospectives.
Strong written and verbal communication. You brief executives without jargon and give engineers precise technical feedback.
Track record with distributed engineering teams and durable institutional knowledge despite churn.
Active, hands-on use of AI engineering tools in your daily workflow (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, or equivalents).

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in healthcare, pharmacy, or regulated software with HIPAA and PHI handling.
Familiarity with AWS (EKS, DynamoDB, SQS, RDS, OpenSearch, Kinesis) and GitOps deployment with ArgoCD or Argo Rollouts.
Experience with experiment-driven product development: A/B testing, configuration-driven feature variants, and analytics review.
Exposure to TypeScript build systems (Nx, webpack), Kendo UI, and Angular Universal (SSR).
Experience helping a team adopt and extend AI-assisted engineering tools in their workflow.

Responsibilities

Write code. Review every significant pull request personally, especially in the admin console and the patient-facing client. Be the senior reviewer your engineers measure themselves against.
Lead on UI design and engineering direction across component structure, state management, accessibility, internationalization, performance budgets, and SSR correctness.
Drive unit and integration test coverage on the UI codebases, set the bar for what “covered” means, and hold the team to it in code review.
Partner with server engineers on API contracts. Read the Java, understand the data model, and push back on designs that will not hold up.
Hold a working mental model of how admin UI, client UI, server, and external integrations fit together, enough to spot incompatibilities before they ship.
Unblock engineers on architectural questions, complex debugging, and cross-service coordination.
Close the gap between engineering and QA, with a focus on automation.
Partner with QA on coverage strategy, agree on the boundary between end-to-end automation and engineering unit/integration tests, and keep that boundary real.
Coach the team toward shift-left testing. Quality is a shared responsibility from the first line of code.
Close the loop on every production defect so the same class of bug does not ship twice.
Confirm that merge requests are addressed promptly and that builds are communicated to QA, including afterhours coordination to reduce day-over-day delays from time-zone gaps.
Directly manage the engineers on the client and admin UI teams: weekly 1:1s, performance feedback, and skills development.
Hold each engineer to a clear performance bar with direct, actionable feedback.
Build a culture of accountability and technical excellence. Move the team beyond a ticket-taker mentality and coach engineers to propose solutions that fit the product vision.
Balance technical load across the team, reassigning work when capacity and priority shift.
Own the technical side of the release process for both UIs: container image promotion, coordinated cut-overs with server and back-end releases, and rollback readiness.
Represent the UI teams in release readiness reviews. Sign off from an engineering standpoint on what goes out, what holds, and what gets rolled back.
Identify technical bottlenecks early, including API dependencies, security review, and environment readiness.
Participate in bug triage and disposition during a release on the technical and severity side.
Partner with product on translating requirements into engineering work, breaking epics into workable tasks, sequencing against capacity, and negotiating scope.
Balance team bandwidth between maintenance/tech debt and high-impact feature work to keep velocity sustainable.

Benefits

Competitive compensation, with a base salary of $175,000 to $200,000 (Exact compensation may vary based on skills and experience)
Eligible for Company Performance-based Bonus Program, based on individual and company performance
Medical, dental, and vision insurance
401K eligible after 3 months of employment, with 50% company match up to first 5% of salary contributed to the plan with a 3-year vesting schedule
HSA for eligible employees enrolled in the HDHP, with a generous company contribution up to $500 for individual coverage and $1,000 for family coverage per year
100% company paid short and long-term disability, AD&D, and group life insurance
Accrued annual paid time off (PTO) of 18 days for the first 3 years of service, increasing thereafter, plus 7 paid holiday days
Employee Assistance Program
Continuing Education funds up to $1,500 annually for eligible programs after 1 year of service
Voluntary benefits including FSA, Hospital Indemnity, Accident, and Critical Illness insurances