Principal Software Engineer - Integration & Data Architecture

GHX is a healthcare supply chain exchange. At its core, what we do is move transaction data reliably between thousands of trading partners. Integration and data architecture are not supporting concerns here; they are central to how our product works and how we scale.

This role owns the long-term stewardship of both problems: how data is modeled, accessed, and owned within our services, and how it flows reliably across them. You will work directly with application teams as a hands-on technical partner and architect, setting technical direction, establishing integration and data patterns, and ensuring the architectural quality we build today does not become tomorrow's maintenance burden. Your peers are strong backend engineers building real products. You earn trust through depth and direct engagement, not architecture diagrams from a distance.

What You'll Do

Integration Architecture & Event-Driven Systems

Define GHX's integration patterns: outbox, saga, CDC, event-carried state transfer, dual-write mitigation, and when to choreograph vs. orchestrate

Guide service boundary design: where to draw domain lines, how to handle shared reference data, and how to prevent shared-database coupling between services

Own the messaging and eventing layer: topic and queue design, schema contracts, partitioning, retention, consumer group management, dead-letter handling, replay, and operational monitoring

Lead the architectural direction for replacing GHX's homegrown event bus with a cloud-native messaging platform, and establish the standards teams will build on after the transition

Guide teams on streaming vs. batch trade-offs and on replacing batch- or file-driven pipelines with event-driven flows where latency and reliability require it

API Design, Contracts & DevOps

Establish REST API design standards: resource modeling, versioning strategy, error contracts, pagination, and backward compatibility

Own the API governance lifecycle: versioning policy, deprecation timelines, breaking change detection in CI/CD, schema compatibility enforcement, and consumer-driven contract testing

Define traffic management patterns for API transitions: versioned routing, canary rollouts, and gateway configuration for safe rollout and rollback

Guide teams on integration style selection and review service designs for evolvability and downstream interface cost

Data Architecture & Database Practice

Work with teams on schema design, data modeling, and aligning data ownership with service boundaries

Guide datastore selection by workload: read/write patterns, consistency requirements, and cost trade-offs across relational, document, key-value, and analytical options; for NoSQL, lead access-pattern-first design including partition strategy, secondary index selection, and partition distribution

Advise on ORM vs. raw query trade-offs and define data access standards that avoid common anti-patterns (N+1, chatty calls, unbounded result sets)

Guide teams on performant data access and zero-downtime schema evolution: indexing strategy, backfill approaches, dual-write windows, and rollback-safe migrations

Establish replication and syndication patterns for cross-service data movement: CDC, change streams, materialized views, and read models

Enablement & Standards

Run design reviews, workshops, and office hours to raise integration and data fundamentals across engineering

Produce decision records, design guides, and reference implementations teams can build from

Present architectural trade-offs and technical risk to engineering leadership, product, and senior stakeholders

Required Qualifications

10+ years building distributed systems, grounded in hands-on software development as an individual contributor: you have written and shipped production code and understand the day-to-day engineering reality your guidance needs to hold up against

Deep experience with event-driven architecture and distributed systems: pub/sub and messaging infrastructure (Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS/EventBridge, or equivalents), integration patterns (outbox, CDC, saga, event sourcing), and failure modes including idempotency, consistency trade-offs, and operational failure handling

Hands-on AWS experience with data and integration services: SQS, SNS, EventBridge, DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora, API Gateway, Lambda

Strong data architecture fundamentals across relational and NoSQL: datastore selection by workload, schema and access-pattern design, ORM trade-offs, and performant data access at scale

Experience designing REST APIs with attention to versioning, backward compatibility, and data contracts, including contract validation in CI/CD pipelines

Experience working directly with application teams during service decomposition, and a track record of establishing integration and data standards across an engineering organization

Strong communication across levels: writing clear decision records for engineering peers, presenting trade-offs to engineering and product leadership, and translating technical risk for senior stakeholders

Heavy personal investment in AI-assisted and agentic development: your workflow has materially changed over the last 6-12 months, you use coding agents for substantial engineering work, and you have concrete examples of where these tools have made you meaningfully faster or produced better outcomes; the engineers around you tend to notice and follow

Preferred Qualifications

Experience integrating with external partners or enterprise platforms (supply chain, ERP, CRM, or similar), including migrating from batch- or file-driven pipelines to event-driven flows

Healthcare or other regulated industry experience

Azure PaaS experience (Service Bus, Cosmos DB, Azure Functions)

Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform or equivalents)

Analytics data layer experience: Snowflake, Redshift, or similar

Data architecture for ML/LLM applications (vector databases, embeddings, RAG patterns)

Prior Principal or Staff Engineer experience

What We're Looking For

You grew up as a developer. You have written the code, debugged the query plan that fell apart at scale, and been on call when a consumer queue fell behind. That experience is what makes architectural guidance credible, and what keeps decisions grounded in the reality of building and operating software. You have worked through the hard problems in distributed systems: service boundaries that do not hold, shared databases that create invisible coupling, async pipelines that fail in ways the original design never anticipated. You bring depth in both the integration layer and the data layer, and you know from experience how problems in one become problems in the other.

You are a hands-on architect who succeeds by making other engineers better. You can design the event contract, identify the breaking change in an API proposal before it ships, and dig into an operational failure when it matters. You write clear decision records, give direct feedback in design reviews, and know when to push back and when to ship. You also communicate well outside engineering: you can present a build-vs-buy decision to an executive, work through a data model with a product manager, and explain reliability risk to a business stakeholder without losing the thread.

Why This Role Matters

GHX is in the middle of a significant architectural transformation: decomposing a large-scale monolith into independently deployable services. The integration and data architecture decisions made during this transition will shape how we build and operate systems for the next decade. Getting it right is what separates genuine team autonomy from coupling that has simply moved into a distributed form.

Beyond the transformation, this is a permanent leadership function. The person in this role will define the technical character of how GHX connects its systems, set standards that persist as the organization scales, and be a direct partner to engineering leadership on the most consequential architectural decisions we make.

Estimated Salary Range for this position: $150,000 to $214,000 plus bonus

The base salary range represents the anticipated low and high end of the GHX’s salary range for this position. The base salary is one component of GHX’s total compensation package for employees. Other rewards and benefits include: health, vision, and dental insurance, accident and life insurance, 401k matching, paid-time off, and education reimbursement, to name a few. To view more details of our benefits, visit us here:  https://www.ghx.com/about/careers/

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  GHX: It's the way you do business in healthcare Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX) enables better patient care and billions in savings for the healthcare community by maximizing automation, efficiency and accuracy of business processes.

GHX is a healthcare business and data automation company, empowering healthcare organizations to enable better patient care and maximize industry savings using our world class cloud-based supply chain technology exchange platform, solutions, analytics and services. We bring together healthcare providers and manufacturers and distributors in North America and Europe - who rely on smart, secure healthcare-focused technology and comprehensive data to automate their business processes and make more informed decisions.

It is our passion and vision for a more operationally efficient healthcare supply chain, helping organizations reduce - not shift - the cost of doing business, paving the way to delivering patient care more effectively. Together we take more than a billion dollars out of the cost of delivering healthcare every year. GHX is privately owned, operates in the United States, Canada and Europe, and employs more than 1000 people worldwide. Our corporate headquarters is in Colorado, with additional offices in Europe.

Disclaimer Global Healthcare Exchange, LLC and its North American subsidiaries (collectively, “GHX”) provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status or any other status protected by applicable law. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any status protected by applicable law. This EEO policy applies to all terms, conditions, and privileges of employment, including hiring, training and development, promotion, transfer, compensation, benefits, educational assistance, termination, layoffs, social and recreational programs, and retirement. GHX believes that employees should be provided with a working environment which enables each employee to be productive and to work to the best of his or her ability. We do not condone or tolerate an atmosphere of intimidation or harassment based on race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status or any other status protected by applicable law. GHX expects and requires the cooperation of all employees in maintaining a discrimination and harassment-free atmosphere. Improper interference with the ability of GHX’s employees to perform their expected job duties is absolutely not tolerated.

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