Director, Engineering

Garner Health•New York, NY

4d•$435,000 - $450,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Garner's mission is to transform the healthcare economy, delivering high-quality and affordable care for all. We are fundamentally reimagining how healthcare works in the U.S. by partnering with employers to redesign healthcare benefits using clear incentives and powerful, data-driven insights. Our approach guides employees to higher-quality, lower-cost care, creating a system that works better for everyone. Patients achieve better health outcomes, employers spend healthcare dollars more effectively, and physicians are rewarded for delivering exceptional care rather than performing more procedures. Garner is one of the fastest-growing healthcare technology companies in the country. Our products are trusted by the most sophisticated employers and providers in the industry, and we are building a team of talented, mission-driven individuals who are motivated to make a meaningful impact on healthcare at scale. About the role: Financial Incentives (FIN) is where Garner's promise becomes real for a member: the moment they are paid back for choosing better care. Behind that simple experience sits one of the hardest problems in the company. FIN ingests claims and eligibility feeds from third-party administrators, adjudicates them against benefit rules, accumulates member benefit, and moves real funds through payments and treasury. It does this under heavy and growing load, carrying PHI and PII, at the point where high-volume data from outside partners first enters Garner. When FIN is right, members are paid accurately and on time. When it is wrong, the failure is financial and visible. We are hiring a Director to lead FIN Engineering, accountable for the full function (ingestion, eligibility, adjudication, accumulation, and payments/treasury): its correctness, reliability, security, and the pace at which it improves. You will lead a large, multi-team function, own its multi-year roadmap, and contribute to company-wide planning. The role is hands-on-keys: you will stay close to the code, the designs, and the incidents to hold a real technical opinion, and set an engineering quality bar the rest of the department measures itself against. You will report to the CTO and lead a group of Engineering Managers and senior individual contributors across FIN's value streams.

Requirements

10+ years building and operating high-scale, high-reliability backend systems, ideally ones that process large data volumes and/or move money.
5+ years leading engineering teams, including managing managers, in a high-accountability, high-urgency environment.
Technical credibility at scale: you can reason through a design doc, a schema, or an incident timeline and write the validation criteria that catch failure.
An opinionated point of view on agent-first / AI-native engineering: not just that teams should use AI, but how to make it the default operating model and mature it safely from assisted toward autonomous.
Experience with the demands of sensitive data (regulated PHI/PII/financial data, unvalidated third-party inputs, encryption, access, audit) and an instinct for reconciliation-first design.
Fluency in distributed systems and modern cloud: event-driven architecture, idempotency, fault tolerance, backpressure, and data consistency under load, plus AWS and API design.
An ownership mindset: you move problems to resolution without being asked and optimize relentlessly for member and business impact.
A desire to be part of a high-performing, mission-driven team that operates with intense urgency, a strong sense of individual accountability, and a commitment to authentic feedback

Nice To Haves

Python, TypeScript, React, NodeJS, Kubernetes, Istio, Postgres, ElasticSearch, NATS, AWS, Terraform

Responsibilities

Own the outcomes, ingestion through payment. Define what "correct" means for adjudication and money movement, and be accountable for adjudication accuracy, payment timeliness, ledger reconciliation, ingestion SLAs, and the roadmap that moves them.
Set the bar and the pace. Establish the validation standards and definition of "done" the function ships against and hold the line under delivery pressure, running a performance culture on evidence: highest-value work first, manual toil automated away, engineers accountable for outcomes.
Stay close to the work. Join the hard design reviews, read the code, dig into incidents, and hold defensible technical positions on adjudication logic, event contracts, data modeling, and money movement.
Make agent-first the default. Make AI-native engineering how FIN works, not a side experiment: build the harnesses, validation frameworks, and Claude Skills that let squads ship faster and safer, and mature the org from assisted toward autonomous with real guardrails.
Own the technical direction. Guide the backend toward event-contract boundaries that let teams ship independently and scale to tens of millions of claims, with the fault tolerance a pipeline that cannot drop or double-pay a claim demands, and own the security and data-integrity posture at the edge where partner data enters and funds leave: validate, quarantine, and reconcile rather than assume the inputs are clean.
Build and grow the team. Hire, level, and develop Engineering Managers and senior ICs, own interviewer calibration, and design the org's structure and decision rights so ownership is clear.
Translate across the business. Partner with the CTO, Product, Finance, Operations, and payment partners to turn business needs into technical plans and communicate risk and tradeoffs in terms leaders can act on.