[Hiring] Director of Engineering @Pennant Services

Role Description

Pennant Services is seeking an experienced, hands-on Director of Engineering to lead the Application Development team that builds products for our post-acute businesses (home health, hospice, home care, and senior living).

Reporting to the Senior Vice President of Digital, the Director of Engineering leads how software is built at Pennant:

• The architecture, delivery system, people, and AI-native engineering practice that lets a small team deliver like a large one.
• The team already uses AI coding agents extensively and integrates with HCHB, Snowflake, Twilio, and Microsoft Entra ID.
• The ideal candidate has led a development team through the AI shift at a startup or growth-stage company.
• Must have architecture judgment they can defend and understand the importance of speed, reliability, security, and responsiveness in a healthcare setting.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Architecture & Platform
  • Own the technical direction of all digital products: service boundaries, data model, integration patterns, and the platform roadmap.
  • Support build / buy / defer decisions and document them with the technical tradeoffs and reversal cost.
  • Set and enforce standards for HIPAA-grade engineering: PHI handling, audit logging, least-privilege access, and environment promotion from sandbox through production.
  • Keep the platform operable: observability, on-call, incident response, and cost management.
• AI-Native Engineering Practice
  • Make AI coding agents the default for design, implementation, testing, and review; remove the barriers that keep engineers from using them well.
  • Build the harnesses that make agent output trustworthy: evaluation suites, automated test generation, CI gates, and review standards.
  • Measure delivery (cycle time, change failure rate, defects reaching the field, cost per release) and report where AI helps and where it hurts.
  • Partner with the Data Science team on how predictive models and LLM features ship into clinical workflows safely.
• Team Leadership & Delivery
  • Lead, mentor, and develop the development team: weekly 1:1s, clear expectations, performance reviews, career paths, and early action on underperformance.
  • Recruit, hire, and retain strong engineers; own the interview loop and raise the bar with every hire.
  • Grow output per engineer through tooling and automation before growing headcount.
• Partnership & Representation
  • Represent Application Development with clinical, operations, finance, and IT leaders; translate business priorities into engineering plans and engineering constraints into business terms.
  • Partner with Product Management, Data, Infrastructure and others to ensure the success of Digital's products.
  • Participate in pilot and rollout conversations with field agencies and operational partners.
  • Partner with IT on shared environments, security review, identity, and the boundary between the application platform and enterprise infrastructure.
  • Contribute to technical strategy and investment cases, including measuring the team's impact on Pennant outcomes.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading engineers as a people manager.
• Led engineering at a startup or growth-stage company through the adoption of AI-assisted development, with measurable before-and-after results.
• Personally built and shipped production software with AI coding agents within the past 6 months.
• Designed and operated a multi-service, cloud-hosted system with a production data layer and third-party integrations.
• Established a quality system (CI/CD, automated testing, code review standards, incident response).
• Experience working under HIPAA, SOC 2, or comparable controls.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Healthcare operations or EHR integration experience.
• Built or ran an AI harness layer: evaluation suites, agent skills, validation frameworks.
• Shipped LLM-backed features to end users and evaluated them for accuracy and safety in production.
• Migrated a product off a low-code or rapid-prototyping platform onto a durable stack.
• Experience with Go, TypeScript / SvelteKit, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Temporal, Azure, and Microsoft Entra ID.
• Experience working alongside data scientists and data engineers on a shared platform.
• Experience inside a larger company's internal product group after time at a startup.

Travel

• Approx. 10–15%, including periodic visits to Service Centers and field operations.

Compensation

• Variable depending on experience and location; eligible for annual bonus and equity.

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

Pennant Services is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace and consider qualified applicants for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.

Job Description Disclaimer

This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work performed in this position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or qualifications. Responsibilities and requirements may change based on business needs.