Head of Engineering, epocrates

Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

Role Summary:
The Head of Engineering, epocrates will lead a large, distributed engineering organization in support of product innovation, platform scalability, and reliable delivery. This Executive Director-level role is based in Remote-US and is a remote position. The role is accountable for aligning engineering execution with business priorities, strengthening technical direction, and building a high-performing leadership bench across multiple geographies. This person will report to the Vice President, Technology and Product.

Team Summary:
epocrates is one of the most widely used point-of-care medical reference tools among U.S. clinicians, supporting over one million registered users. As part of athenahealth, epocrates is entering a period of renewed investment focused on expanding its platform, accelerating delivery, and introducing AI-enabled clinical capabilities that support better decisions at the point of care.

The Head of Engineering will lead all software engineering for epocrates as a core member of the R&D leadership team, working in close partnership with Product and Design to define problems, shape solutions, and deliver outcomes. This role is responsible for creating an engineering organization that participates early in product thinking, contributes technical perspective throughout the lifecycle, and owns delivery with transparency and consistency.

The organization includes approximately 75 engineers distributed across multiple geographies. This leader will establish the operating model, technical direction, and leadership structure needed to scale a dependable, high-accountability engineering function. The role also plays a key part in ensuring architectural coherence, managing cross-team dependencies, and translating investment decisions into customer and business value.

Essential Job Responsibilities:

• Lead engineering as a core R&D partner by co-owning product outcomes with Product and Design from problem definition through delivery.

• Establish operating rhythms and delivery systems that improve predictability, transparency, and accountability across teams.

• Build a culture of shared ownership where engineering teams shape problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and deliver outcomes with clear commitments.

• Drive early technical review of scope, feasibility, sequencing, and risk to inform decisions before commitments are finalized.

• Define and communicate a technical strategy and architectural direction that aligns with business priorities and supports long-term sustainability.

• Guide build, buy, and adopt decisions using a balanced view of customer impact, engineering cost, scalability, and speed to value.

• Manage cross-team dependencies, integration points, and risks across geographies to support reliable delivery of complex initiatives.

• Develop engineering directors and senior technical leaders through coaching, accountability, succession planning, and role clarity.

• Strengthen engineering partnership with Product and Design by ensuring early collaboration on user experience, feasibility, and delivery planning.

• Apply AI-enabled tools and approaches to improve engineering planning, decision support, and delivery workflows, and help leaders evaluate where AI can responsibly improve speed, quality, and insight in the organization.

Additional Job Responsibilities:

• Support annual planning, budgeting, and resource allocation for the R&D organization.

• Contribute to workforce planning and partner with recruiting to close capability gaps.

• Represent engineering perspectives in executive-level discussions on priorities, investment, and tradeoffs.

• Monitor engineering economics, including vendor usage, capacity allocation, and delivery efficiency.

• Promote business fluency across engineering so teams understand user impact, revenue considerations, cost, and risk.

• Facilitate organizational change initiatives that improve operating effectiveness and cross-functional collaboration.

• Review delivery and technical health metrics to identify patterns, risks, and opportunities for improvement.

• Collaborate with peer leaders to align epocrates execution with athenahealth platform and product direction.

Expected Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 15–20 years of progressive experience in software engineering and technology leadership.

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, including 5+ years in senior leadership roles.

• Proven experience leading multi-team engineering organizations delivering complex products at scale.

• Experience defining and driving technical strategy across distributed systems, cloud architectures, and modern platforms.

• Demonstrated success building and developing high-performing engineering leaders and teams.

• Experience operating as part of an integrated R&D leadership team in partnership with Product and Design.

• Strong understanding of engineering economics, including resource planning, budgeting, and vendor management.

• Experience with Agile delivery across multiple concurrent teams.

• Healthcare technology experience is a plus, but not required.

Expected Compensation

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.