Director, Engineering

Garner Health•New York, NY

10d•$395,000 - $414,000•Onsite

About The Position

Garner is hiring a Director to lead Financial Incentives (FIN) Engineering, a function responsible for claims and eligibility ingestion, benefit adjudication and accumulation, and payments and treasury. FIN processes sensitive health and financial data and moves real funds, so the role is accountable for the function’s correctness, reliability, security, and ongoing improvement. The Director will lead a large, multi-team organization, own its multi-year roadmap, and contribute to company-wide planning. The role reports to the CTO and leads Engineering Managers and senior individual contributors across FIN’s value streams. This is a hands-on technical leadership position. The Director is expected to stay close to code, designs, and incidents; set a high engineering quality bar; and establish clear validation standards and definitions of done. The role will guide technical direction toward event-contract boundaries, resilient high-scale processing, and strong security and data-integrity practices. It will also make AI-native engineering a default operating model by developing tools, validation frameworks, and Claude Skills with safeguards for gradual progression toward greater autonomy. The position is based in Garner’s New York City Financial District office, with in-office work required three days per week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The target salary range is $395,000–$414,000 inclusive of bonus. The role is eligible for equity incentives and benefits including flexible PTO, medical, dental, and vision plan options, a 401(k), and Teladoc Health.

Requirements

10+ years building and operating high-scale, high-reliability backend systems; experience with large data volumes and/or money movement is preferred in the posting.
5+ years leading engineering teams, including managing managers, in a high-accountability, high-urgency environment.
Technical credibility at scale, including the ability to reason through design documents, schemas, and incident timelines and write validation criteria that catch failures.
Experience with sensitive data, such as regulated PHI, PII, or financial data; unvalidated third-party inputs; encryption; access controls; and auditing.
Fluency in distributed systems and modern cloud technologies, including event-driven architecture, idempotency, fault tolerance, backpressure, data consistency under load, AWS, and API design.
An ownership mindset and ability to move problems to resolution while optimizing for member and business impact.
Commitment to a high-performing, mission-driven team with urgency, individual accountability, and authentic feedback.
Willingness to work in Garner’s New York City office three days per week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Nice To Haves

Experience building high-scale, high-reliability backend systems that process large data volumes and/or move money.
An opinionated point of view on agent-first or AI-native engineering, including how to make it a default operating model and mature it safely from assisted toward autonomous.

Responsibilities

Own FIN outcomes from ingestion through payment, including adjudication accuracy, payment timeliness, ledger reconciliation, ingestion service-level agreements, and the roadmap to improve them.
Define what correctness means for adjudication and money movement.
Set validation standards and definitions of done, prioritize high-value work, automate manual toil, and hold engineers accountable for outcomes.
Participate in design reviews, read code, investigate incidents, and provide technical direction on adjudication logic, event contracts, data modeling, and money movement.
Make AI-native engineering the default for FIN by building harnesses, validation frameworks, and Claude Skills, and mature the organization from AI-assisted toward autonomous engineering with appropriate guardrails.
Guide backend technical direction toward event-contract boundaries that enable independent team delivery and scaling to tens of millions of claims.
Establish fault tolerance so claims are not dropped or paid twice, and own security and data-integrity practices for partner data and outgoing funds, including validation, quarantine, and reconciliation.
Hire, level, and develop Engineering Managers and senior individual contributors; own interviewer calibration; and design organizational structure and decision rights.
Partner with the CTO, Product, Finance, Operations, and payment partners to turn business needs into technical plans and communicate risks and tradeoffs to leaders.
Contribute to company-wide planning and own FIN Engineering’s multi-year roadmap.