Tech Lead Manager

SimplePractice

45d•$180,000 - $225,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At SimplePractice, we are improving access to quality care by equipping health and wellness clinicians with all the tools they need to thrive in private practice. More than 250,000 providers trust SimplePractice to build their business through our industry-leading software with powerful tools that simplify every part of practice management. From admin work to clinical care, our suite of innovative solutions work together to reduce administrative burden—empowering solo and small group practitioners to thrive alongside their clients. Recognized by MedTech Breakthrough as the Best Practice Management Solution Provider in 2024 and the Digital Health Awards in 2023, SimplePractice is proud to pave the future of health tech. Our Culture At SimplePractice, we think big, we take simplicity seriously, we come as we are, we act with humility, and we are built on trust. We are committed to fostering a culture of high performance and strong accountability and seek out the personalities and talents that have the potential to make us a stronger community of builders and problem solvers. The Role This is a hybrid technical leadership and people management role. You'll lead a team of engineers, write code yourself, make architectural decisions, and own the delivery of foundational infrastructure that every application team at SimplePractice depends on.

Requirements

You've built or operated distributed data systems.
You've worked with database sharding, replication, or horizontal scaling in production.
You understand the tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and you've made real decisions about things like shard key selection, cross-shard queries, or zero-downtime data migration
You've designed or contributed to event-driven architectures.
You've worked with message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kinesis, or similar), built event publishing patterns, or designed consumers that handle idempotency and failure gracefully
You understand why "at-least-once" delivery means you need to think about duplicate processing
You've led small, high-impact teams.
You've managed 2-5 engineers and been responsible for both their technical output and their growth
You know how to create clarity when the team is small enough that every person's contribution is visible and every gap is felt
You've done this while still writing meaningful code yourself
You think in systems, not just components.
You see the database, the event broker, the application layer, and the team dynamics as parts of one system. When something breaks, your instinct is to understand why it broke — not just to fix the symptom
You communicate clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
You can explain to a product manager why sharding takes 6 months and to a staff engineer why you chose a composite key over UUIDs
You write well
You present the problem, not just the solution

Nice To Haves

MySQL/Aurora experience is a plus but not required — the principles transfer
Experience with Ruby on Rails at scale
Experience with AWS infrastructure (Aurora, MSK/Kafka, EKS)
Healthcare or HIPAA-regulated environment experience
Experience building platform teams or internal developer tools

Responsibilities

Lead the architectural design for how we scale our data layer — evaluate approaches, make the hard tradeoff decisions, and build the proof of concept that validates the path forward
Ship the first event-driven integration end-to-end — reliable publishing, a pre-computed read model, and a real application team consuming it
Write code. Review code. Debug production issues. The problems are too important for anyone to be purely a coordinator
Establish golden paths — documented, tested patterns that make it easy for application teams to build on the platform without needing to coordinate with us
Partner with application teams hands-on during early integrations — we believe in working alongside our first customers, not handing them documentation and walking away
Run weekly office hours where any engineering squad can bring platform questions
Own the technical direction of the platform — make the hard calls on build vs. buy, when to invest in abstraction vs. when to ship the pragmatic thing
Manage, mentor, and grow your engineers — with potential to expand the team based on scope and delivery
Design and run quarterly developer experience check-ins to measure whether we're actually making engineers' lives easier
Represent the platform team in cross-functional discussions, incident response, and architectural reviews