Software Engineering Manager (Digital Health & AI)

About Us Housecall is a tech-enabled primary care company delivering virtual and in-person care with a mission to measurably improve healthcare outcomes and people’s quality of life. Job Description We’re hiring an Engineering Manager to lead a small, fast-growing engineering team while remaining meaningfully hands-on. You’ll partner closely with Product and Clinical stakeholders to deliver predictable outcomes, establish durable quality and release practices, and raise the bar on reliability, resiliency, and security. You’ll help the team build and integrate systems that support core healthcare workflows, including EMR/EHR-adjacent capabilities and third-party clinical integrations. This is a player/coach role. You will spend your time across people leadership and delivery ownership (team health, execution, stakeholder alignment) and hands-on technical contribution (high-leverage coding, reviews, pairing, architecture guidance). Hands-on contribution typically starts around ~30–50% and flexes with team needs as we scale. Team and Scope Lead a single, small product engineering team (growing headcount). Work in a mixed backend stack: PHP/Laravel and TypeScript/Node.js. Cloud environment: Azure preferred (or equivalent) with infrastructure managed via Terraform. Reliability and operational ownership are part of product engineering (incident response, runbooks, postmortems). On-call is shared team ownership; rotation details will be discussed during the process. What Success Looks Like In the first ~90 days: Delivery cadence is clearer: backlog is healthier, priorities are explicit, and stakeholders understand tradeoffs. The team has a crisp Definition of Done and lightweight release readiness criteria. You’ve shipped meaningful product work while improving at least one reliability/quality choke point (tests, CI/CD, observability, release safety, etc.). One high-impact integration or workflow area (e.g., scheduling, charting, labs, messaging, payments/billing, referrals) has clearer ownership, reliability, and delivery cadence. In ~6 months: Delivery is predictable with a consistent planning/review rhythm and fewer last-minute surprises. Quality improves measurably: fewer regressions, faster diagnosis, and smoother releases. Reliability and resiliency practices are routine (good alerts, runbooks, postmortems with follow-through). Security/compliance practices are embedded (traceability, least privilege, audit readiness). Integrations are easier to ship and safer to operate (clear contracts, monitoring, retries/idempotency, well-defined failure handling). Requirements People and Culture: Lead, coach, and grow engineers through 1:1s, feedback, performance management, and career development. Build a healthy team environment with strong ownership, continuous improvement, and sustainable pace. Hire and onboard effectively: role definition, structured interviews, and high-quality onboarding. Delivery and Planning (Scrum, pragmatically): Own execution: turn priorities into plans, manage scope and dependencies, and communicate timelines and risks clearly. Run (or ensure strong ownership of) Scrum rituals to support predictability: backlog refinement, sprint planning, standups, reviews/demos, and retrospectives—adapting as needed to maximize outcomes. Partner with Product and Clinical stakeholders to clarify requirements, make tradeoffs explicit, and deliver incrementally. Technical Leadership (Player/Coach): Contribute directly to the codebase in high-leverage areas (critical paths, reliability/security work, complex features). Provide architectural guidance across Laravel and Node.js services: clean interfaces, ownership boundaries, and maintainable patterns. Guide integration patterns and operational practices for third-party systems (clear contracts, versioning, monitoring, safe retries, and failure modes). Uphold code quality through reviews, pairing, and mentorship, avoiding bottlenecks by enabling the team to own decisions. Quality and Release Excellence (QA as a system): Establish lightweight, scalable quality practices (not a separate QA org): Clear Definition of Done and release readiness checks Test strategy and automation (unit/feature/integration/contract/E2E as appropriate) Risk-based testing for patient- and clinician-facing workflows Improve CI/CD with practical quality gates (tests, linting, security checks, deploy safety) and a smooth developer workflow. Reliability, Resiliency, Security, and Cloud Operations: Strengthen observability (metrics/logging/tracing), alerting, and runbooks to reduce time-to-diagnosis and time-to-recovery. Lead incident practices and ensure follow-through: incident response, postmortems, and durable corrective actions. Drive resiliency improvements: timeouts/retries, idempotency, rate limiting, queue robustness, graceful degradation, backups, and recovery readiness. Embed secure engineering practices: least privilege, secrets management, encryption where appropriate, audit logging, and change traceability. Promote secure, scalable, cost-aware cloud operations in Azure (preferred) or equivalent, and drive infrastructure-as-code patterns with Terraform (standards/guardrails and reviews). Minimum Qualifications 6+ years in software engineering, with 2+ years leading people or leading complex projects with clear ownership of delivery and mentorship. Proven experience building and operating production backend systems using PHP/Laravel and TypeScript/Node.js (deep in one plus ability to ramp in the other is acceptable). Demonstrated ability to improve predictable delivery (planning, scope management, dependency management, incremental delivery). Experience establishing practical quality practices (test strategy, automation, release criteria). Track record improving production reliability (observability, incidents/postmortems, root-cause fixes). Cloud experience in Azure (preferred) or comparable (AWS/GCP), including secure networking and IAM. Experience with infrastructure-as-code using Terraform (or similar). Strong security and privacy fundamentals; experience in regulated environments (HIPAA/ISO 27001) is a plus. Excellent communication and stakeholder management, including with non-technical partners. Preferred Qualifications Healthcare domain experience building products used in clinical workflows (care delivery, scheduling, charting/documentation, orders/results, messaging, referrals, billing/claims, eligibility). Experience building or integrating with EMR/EHR systems (or EMR-adjacent platforms) and operating those integrations reliably in production. Healthcare interoperability and integrations: FHIR/HL7 and third-party/vendor integrations (integration engines a plus). Asynchronous processing patterns (queues/event-driven), caching, and performance tuning. Experience defining SLOs/error budgets or implementing pragmatic resilience testing (e.g., game days). Strong Azure operational experience and cost optimization. How We Work Outcome-focused: tight scopes, short feedback loops, measurable impact. Quality-first: reviews, tests, and continuous delivery with clear release criteria. Security-minded: privacy and compliance built into design and operations. Pragmatic: keep what works; improve what doesn’t. Benefits We offer a competitive compensation package, full-time employment with a standard contract and applicable statutory benefits, comprehensive health insurance, and visa sponsorship for eligible hires. For candidates relocating to the UAE, we provide relocation support and guidance through the process. You’ll also receive paid time off and public holidays in line with UAE labor practices, plus the tools you need to do your best work (laptop and required software).