Sr. Director, Software Engineering

Details

• Department: Growth Marketing Digital Experience (GMDx)
• Schedule: Monday - Friday, 8 hour shift
• Location: Remote
• Salary: $146,000 - $248,200
• Eligible for annual bonus incentive

Benefits

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering teams for multiple strategic digital products, accountable for planning, delivery, quality, reliability, and operations.
• Partner closely with Product, Experience, Architecture, Data, Security, and Program leadership to drive outcomes, roadmaps, and release timelines.
• Own technical design decisions, including functional and non-functional requirements such as scalability, security, performance, and resiliency.
• Communicate engineering and AI vision, strategy, delivery plans, and progress to executive and senior stakeholders.

• Define and execute the AI engineering strategy for digital products, aligned with Ascension’s enterprise AI, data, privacy, and security strategies.
• Lead the design, development, and productionization of AI-enabled solutions, leveraging:
  
  • Generative AI (LLMs, copilots, conversational interfaces)
  • Intelligent search, personalization, and recommendations
  • Workflow automation and decision support
• Establish best practices for LLMOps, including model lifecycle management, prompt engineering, evaluation, monitoring, and retraining.
• Ensure responsible AI practices, including explainability, bias mitigation, data privacy, regulatory compliance (HIPAA, healthcare AI guidance), and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Evaluate and govern AI platforms, tools, and vendors (cloud AI services, open-source frameworks, model providers).

• Lead by example in building high-quality, maintainable, secure, and performant systems using cloud-native and AI-enabled architectures.
• Drive shift-left practices across testing, security, observability, performance, and AI quality evaluation.
• Foster strong peer review, architecture review, and model review cultures.
• Champion reuse of shared platforms, APIs, data products, and AI components.

• Embed DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and automated quality gates across software and AI pipelines.
• Drive a strong SRE and production ownership mindset, including incident response, reliability engineering, and cost optimization.
• Implement metrics-driven product and AI health reporting (availability, latency, quality, model performance, cost, and adoption).

• Contribute to Ascension GMDx–wide engineering and AI strategy, standards, frameworks, and reference architectures.
• Stay current with emerging trends in software engineering, AI, and healthcare technology, translating them into practical solutions.
• Promote experimentation, rapid prototyping, and data-informed decision making.
• Represent Ascension engineering in internal forums and external communities through presentations, demos, and knowledge sharing.

• Build, mentor, and grow high-performing teams of engineering leaders, software engineers, and AI engineers.
• Upskill teams in AI literacy, modern engineering practices, and responsible innovation.
• Drive a culture of curiosity, learning, inclusion, and continuous improvement.

• Manage budgets, forecasts, and vendor contracts, including AI platforms, tooling, and service providers.
• Evaluate build vs. buy decisions for AI and digital capabilities.

• Curious about technology and AI: Actively explores how emerging technologies and AI can improve patient, clinician, and associate experiences.
• Continuous learner: Invests in ongoing growth for self and teams, especially in rapidly evolving AI and engineering domains.
• Change-ready leader: Navigates ambiguity, drives transformation, and leads teams through technological and organizational change.
• Feedback-driven: Embeds feedback loops in software, AI systems, and leadership practices.
• Self-aware and situationally aware: Balances confidence with humility and sound judgment.
• Positive and resilient: Approaches complex healthcare challenges with optimism and purpose.
• Collaborative: Values teamwork, mentorship, and cross-functional partnership.
• Values-driven: Lives Ascension’s core values of service of the poor, reverence, integrity, wisdom, creativity, and dedication.

Requirements

• High School diploma equivalency with 5 years of applicable cumulative job specific experience required, with 2 of those years being in leadership/management OR Associate's degree/Bachelor's degree with 3 years of applicable cumulative job specific experience required, with 2 of those years being in leadership/management.

Additional Preferences

• Expertise in architecting and delivering scalable, highly available, consumer-facing digital platforms.
• Strong experience with AI systems, including model integration, inference services, vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Hands-on knowledge of AI and data platforms (e.g., GCP Vertex AI, Azure AI, OpenAI ecosystem, open-source ML frameworks).
• Experience with modern search, integration, microservices, and data technologies (GraphQL/REST, Spring Boot, Cloud SQL, NoSQL).
• Experience with observability platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, Datadog) and AI/model monitoring.
• Cloud-native experience in GCP and/or Azure, including healthcare-specific services.
• Experience with experimentation, feature flags, and A/B testing.
• Strong understanding of healthcare interoperability standards (FHIR, HL7) and regulations (HIPAA, Cures Act), especially as applied to AI.
• Deep computer science fundamentals and modern software engineering best practices across the full SDLC.
• Demonstrated experience leading large engineering organizations and complex transformations.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Why Join Our Team

Equal Employment Opportunity Employer

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