Principal Software Engineer, Front End Rearchitecture

Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all. Role Summary: The Principal Frontend Engineer will serve as a senior technical authority shaping the architecture, standards, and long-term direction of frontend engineering across a complex suite of clinical applications. This hybrid role is based in Boston, MA, and blends deep hands-on technical work with broad cross-team influence — setting the engineering vision, driving alignment across multiple product areas, and elevating the quality and consistency of frontend systems at scale. Team Summary: The Clinicals Front End Rearchitecture Initiative is an engineering-led program with a bold and clear goal: replace a fragmented set of frontend architectures across Clinicals applications with a single, modern, React-based platform that is built to last. Across the current landscape, multiple technologies, patterns, and data access approaches are operating in parallel — creating maintenance overhead, slowing feature delivery, and producing an inconsistent experience for users and developers alike. This initiative is designed to fundamentally resolve that complexity. A central element of this work is the transition from a home-grown Data Broker to GraphQL as the standard for frontend data access — creating cleaner, more reliable, and more scalable contracts between frontend and backend systems. Node.js is integral to this architecture, supporting build infrastructure, server-side rendering, and lightweight middleware layers that serve the broader frontend ecosystem. The initiative is also establishing a shared component library, testing standards, and architectural conventions that will serve as the foundation for frontend development across Clinicals long into the future. As a Principal Frontend Engineer, this person will operate at the intersection of deep technical expertise and broad organizational influence. They will help define the architecture that other engineers build within, ensure that engineering decisions are durable and well-reasoned, and bring clarity and direction to some of the most complex technical challenges on the team. The work is consequential — this platform underpins clinical software used by healthcare providers every day — and this role is one of the most impactful technical positions within the initiative. Essential Job Responsibilities: Architect and lead the design of large-scale, production-grade frontend systems using JavaScript, React.js, TypeScript, and Node.js, ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with organizational engineering strategy. Establish frontend engineering standards, architectural patterns, and component system conventions that are adopted broadly across Clinicals engineering teams. Define and govern the technical approach for integrating frontend applications with backend services through GraphQL and RESTful APIs, ensuring consistency and reliability across data access patterns. Drive the multi-year frontend modernization roadmap, including migration strategy, phasing, and technical risk management across the Clinicals platform. Partner with engineering leadership, product management, and design to align technical direction with long-term product and business objectives. Mentor and technically guide Lead, Senior, and mid-level engineers — building team capability, shaping engineering culture, and supporting the professional growth of others. Evaluate and integrate AI-assisted development tooling into the frontend engineering workflow — assessing the suitability of available tools for tasks such as code generation, test automation, and performance analysis — and guide the team in adopting practices that responsibly amplify productivity and quality. Lead cross-team technical reviews, design discussions, and architectural decision-making forums, ensuring diverse perspectives are incorporated and outcomes are well-documented. Identify and address systemic sources of technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and architectural inconsistencies across the Clinicals frontend codebase. Represent frontend engineering in broader organizational planning, contributing technical insight to prioritization, resource, and platform investment decisions. Additional Job Responsibilities: Oversee or advise on frontend build, release, and deployment pipeline design using Jenkins or Harness continuous integration and delivery tooling. Provide technical guidance on integrations involving Oracle databases or backend data services that affect frontend application behavior. Review and advise on legacy implementations involving Perl scripts or utilities where they intersect with the modern frontend platform. Contribute architectural guidance for frontend infrastructure deployed on AWS (Amazon Web Services), including relevant services for hosting, CDN, and runtime environments. Participate in and influence engineering hiring processes, including technical evaluation and calibration for frontend engineering roles. Engage with external engineering communities, conferences, or standards bodies to stay current with advances in frontend technology and bring relevant insights back to the organization. Contribute to the long-term engineering workforce strategy by identifying capability gaps and advising on team structure and skill development. Serve as a technical escalation point for complex, high-priority frontend engineering challenges across the organization. Collaborate with security and platform engineering teams to ensure frontend systems meet compliance, reliability, and security standards. Help build and maintain a culture of technical excellence, psychological safety, and continuous improvement within the engineering organization. Expected Education & Experience: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degree is a plus. 10 to 15 years of professional software engineering experience, with a significant focus on frontend architecture and development at scale. Expert-level proficiency in JavaScript and TypeScript, with a strong record of applying both in complex, high-traffic production environments. Deep expertise in React.js, including advanced state management, performance optimization, design system architecture, and large-scale component library development. Strong proficiency in Node.js for build tooling, server-side rendering, and frontend-adjacent service design. Demonstrated experience with GraphQL — including schema design, client integration, and establishing data access patterns across a frontend platform. Exposure to Perl, Oracle, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Jenkins, and/or Harness is preferred; experience with cloud-based frontend infrastructure is an advantage. Proven ability to define and lead frontend architecture strategies across multiple teams or product areas, including migration planning and technical governance. Experience working within Agile software development lifecycle (SDLC) practices, including roadmap planning, iterative delivery, and cross-functional technical collaboration. Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to engineering, product, and executive stakeholders in a hybrid work environment. Expected Compensation $164,000 - $280,000 The base salary range shown reflects the full range for this role from minimum to maximum. At athenahealth, base pay depends on multiple factors, including job-related experience, relevant knowledge and skills, how your qualifications compare to others in similar roles, and geographical market rates. Base pay is only one part of our competitive Total Rewards package - depending on role eligibility, we offer both short and long-term incentives by way of an annual discretionary bonus plan, variable compensation plan, and equity plans. About athenahealth Our vision: In an industry that becomes more comple