Tech Lead Manager

About UsAt 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.Award-winning and people-first, SimplePractice is shaping the future of health tech. Recognized by MedTech Breakthrough, the Digital Health Awards, and BuiltIn's Best Places to Work.Our CultureAt 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 RoleThis 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.ResponsibilitiesWhat 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 forwardShip the first event-driven integration end-to-end - reliable publishing, a pre-computed read model, and a real application team consuming itWrite code. Review code. Debug production issues. The problems are too important for anyone to be purely a coordinatorEstablish golden paths - documented, tested patterns that make it easy for application teams to build on the platform without needing to coordinate with usPartner with application teams hands-on during early integrations - we believe in working alongside our first customers, not handing them documentation and walking awayRun weekly office hours where any engineering squad can bring platform questionsWhat 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 thingManage, mentor, and grow your engineers - with potential to expand the team based on scope and deliveryDesign and run quarterly developer experience check-ins to measure whether we're actually making engineers' lives easierRepresent the platform team in cross-functional discussions, incident response, and architectural reviewsDesired Skills & ExperienceWe 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 migrationMySQL/Aurora experience is a plus but not required - the principles transferYou'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 gracefullyYou understand why "at-least-once" delivery means you need to think about duplicate processingYou've led small, high-impact teams.You've managed 2-5 engineers and been responsible for both their technical output and their growthYou know how to create clarity when the team is small enough that every person's contribution is visible and every gap is feltYou've done this while still writing meaningful code yourselfYou 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 symptomYou 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 UUIDsYou write wellYou present the problem, not just the solutionBonus PointsExperience with Ruby on Rails at scaleExperience with AWS infrastructure (Aurora, MSK/Kafka, EKS)Healthcare or HIPAA-regulated environment experienceExperience building platform teams or internal developer toolsBenefitsWe offer a competitive benefits program including:Medical, dental, vision, life & disability insurance401(k) plan with company match & employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)Flexible Time Off (FTO), wellbeing days, paid holidays, and summer FridaysMental health resourcesPaid parental leave & Backup CareTuition reimbursementEmployee Resource Groups (ERGs)California Job Applicant Privacy NoticeThank you for your interest in opportunities at SimplePractice LLC ("SimplePractice" or "us" or "we" or "our"). Please note that when you submit your resume or application materials to us for employment purposes, you are subject to theSimplePractice California Job Applicant Privacy Notice .For more information about our privacy practices, please contact us atprivacy@simplepractice.com .Base salary is one component of total compensation. Employees may also be eligible for an annual bonus or commission. Some roles may also be eligible for overtime pay.The amount below represents the expected annual base compensation range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we'll consider many factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, geographic location, and other job-related factors.Base Compensation Range$180,000—$225,000 USD