Tech Lead Manager

About Us

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.

Responsibilities

What you'll do in your first 6 months:

• 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

What you'll do ongoing:

• 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

Desired Skills & Experience

We care more about what you've done and how you think than where you went to school or what's on your resume. If you've built the systems described below — even if your path to getting there was unconventional — we want to talk.

• 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
• MySQL/Aurora experience is a plus but not required — the principles transfer
• 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

Bonus Points

• 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

Key skills/competency

• Technical Leadership
• People Management
• Data Systems Architecture
• Event-Driven Architectures
• Distributed Systems
• System Design
• Mentorship
• Problem Solving
• Communication
• Production Support