Platform Architect

Ironwood Digital is on a mission to accelerate healthcare’s transformation with useful data. Ironwood Digital Engine, a flexible interoperability platform, connects and powers real-time healthcare data exchange. With just one connection, data can be orchestrated across a growing network of 12,000+ systems and organizations, including 100+ electronic health record systems (EHRs). Ironwood Digital processes over 1.2 billion messages per month across our health tech vendor, provider, payer, EHR, and life sciences customers. Opportunity & Impact As a Platform Architect at Ironwood Digital , you will provide the technical vision and strategy for the core infrastructure that powers Ironwood Digital ’s global healthcare interoperability platform. You will support and evolve a high-throughput, low-latency engine that handles billions of monthly messages, ensuring it remains resilient, secure, and scalable as we expand our network. This is a high-leverage role where you won't just draw diagrams; you will be a hands-on leader focused on identifying the right points of leverage to simplify our complex systems. Your mission is to modernize our architecture in ways that reduce maintenance overhead and significantly increase overall engineering velocity. At Ironwood Digital , we believe that the best technical decisions are made in an environment of high psychological safety. We regard mistakes as opportunities for growth rather than judgment, and we expect our Architects to be learners who lead with curiosity. If you are energized by solving "impossible" distributed systems problems by finding elegant, simple solutions within a transparent, collaborative culture, this role is for you. Our Engineering Culture & How We Work Psychological Safety, Ownership & Autonomy as Core Cultural Pillars: We aspire to make room for everyone to be heard, regardless of level. We work transparently and openly, normalizing that we are all learners. As an Architect, you will play a key role in fostering this environment, embracing questions, and acknowledging mistakes as part of the process. We believe that psychological safety provides the environment for autonomy and ownership to flourish. Radical Transparency: We prefer to communicate openly. In Slack, we use public channels over DMs. In meetings, we record and publish notes. We work asynchronously and transparently whenever possible, leaning into the "risk" of exposing incomplete knowledge in public forums to promote better collective decision-making. The Product + Engineering Interface: Collaboration is at our core. You will be a primary collaborator with Product Managers during Discovery and Refinement phases, defining scope and constraints early. You will partner with Project Engineering Leads (PELs) to develop technical plans that balance feasibility with innovation. Engineering-Driven Projects: We value technical ownership. You will have the opportunity to drive projects defined by Engineering, consulting on scope, budget, and priority to ensure our platform stays modern and resilient. Job Responsibilities Architectural Vision & Strategy: Define and maintain the long-term technical roadmap for the Ironwood Digital Engine, ensuring our systems can scale 10x while maintaining 99.95%+ uptime, while maintaining high throughput and low latency. Hands-on Technical Leadership: Identify and execute on strategic points of leverage to simplify complex systems. You will lead the design of critical components, producing architectural design docs and proof-of-concepts that modernize the platform and reduce long-term maintenance overhead. You’ll write code in this position, not just design systems. Engineering Velocity: Actively work to remove technical friction for product squads. By simplifying core platform patterns, you will enable teams to build, test, and deploy with greater speed and safety. You’ll also work closely with the team to drive improvements in CICD processes and developer workflows, both with the goal of making overall development faster and simpler. Cross-Team Alignment: Partner with Product, Security, and Engineering leads to ensure architectural consistency across distributed squads, breaking down silos and resolving technical friction. Infrastructure & Scalability: Optimize our cloud-native environment (AWS) for performance and cost, advocating for modern patterns in microservices, event-driven architecture, and low-touch resilience. Mentorship & Culture: Foster a culture of technical excellence by mentoring Senior and Staff engineers, leading architectural review forums, and championing psychological safety, autonomy, and ownership within the team. Tech Debt Management: Proactively identify and prioritize systemic technical debt, creating clear migration paths for legacy systems without disrupting customer operations. Required Skills & Experience 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3-5 years in a dedicated Architecture or Lead/Principal level role building large-scale distributed systems. Expertise in Cloud-Native Architectu