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

Paid time off (PTO)

Various health insurance options & wellness plan

Retirement benefits including employer match plan

Long-term & short-term disability

Employee assistance programs (EAP)

Parental leave & adoption assistance

Tuition reimbursement

Ways to give back to your community

Benefit options and eligibility vary by position. Compensation varies based on factors including, but not limited to, experience, skills, education, performance, location and salary range at the time of the offer.

Responsibilities

Accelerate Ascension's journey to transform healthcare for those we serve and those who serve by delivering brand-wide digital experiences powered by people, design, data, AI, and technology.

You will be a change agent in the software engineering organization, responsible for engineering delivery with quality and speed across multiple digital products, while driving operational excellence. In addition to core engineering leadership, this role will lead the adoption, governance, and scaling of AI-enabled capabilities (including generative AI, and intelligent automation) across digital products and platforms. Success in this role ensures high-quality technical delivery, responsible AI implementation, and a culture of continuous innovation and engineering excellence.

Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• 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.

AI & Intelligent Systems Leadership

• 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).

Engineering Excellence & Modern Practices

• 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.

Operational Excellence & DevSecOps

• 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).

Thought Leadership & Innovation

• 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.

Talent, Culture & Change Leadership

• 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.

Budgeting & Partner Management

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

Characteristics We Seek

• 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

Education:

• 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., Google Cloud Platform 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 Google Cloud Platform 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.

#GMDx

Why Join Our Team

Ascension associates are key to our commitment of transforming healthcare and providing care to all, especially those most in need. Join us and help us drive impact through reimagining how we can deliver a people-centered healthcare experience and creating the solutions to do it. Explore career opportunities across our ministry locations and within our corporate headquarters.

Ascension is a leading non-profit, faith-based national health system made up of over 134,000 associates and 2,600 sites of care, including more than 140 hospitals and 40 senior living communities in 19 states.

Our Mission, Vision and Values encompass everything we do at Ascension. Every associate is empowered to give back, volunteer and make a positive impact in their community. Ascension careers are more than jobs; they are opportunities to enhance your life and the lives of the people around you.

Equal Employment Opportunity Employer

Ascension provides Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) to all associates and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, lactation, breastfeeding, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, all as defined by applicable law, and any other legally protected status or characteristic in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws.

For further information, view the EEO Know Your Rights (English) poster or EEO Know Your Rights (Spanish) poster.

As a military friendly organization, Ascension promotes career flexibility and offers many benefits to help support the well-being of our military families, spouses, veterans and reservists. Our associates are empowered to apply their military experience and unique perspective to their civilian career with Ascension.

Please note that Ascension will make an offer of employment only to individuals who have applied for a position using our official application. Be on alert for possible fraudulent offers of employment. Ascension will not solicit money or banking information from applicants.

E-Verify Statement

This employer participates in the Electronic Employment Verification Program. Please click the E-Verify link below for more information.

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Responsibilities

Accelerate Ascension's journey to transform healthcare for those we serve and those who serve by delivering brand-wide digital experiences powered by people, design, data, AI, and technology.

You will be a change agent in the software engineering organization, responsible for engineering delivery with quality and speed across multiple digital products, while driving operational excellence. In addition to core engineering leadership, this role will lead the adoption, governance, and scaling of AI-enabled capabilities (including generative AI, and intelligent automation) across digital products and platforms. Success in this role ensures high-quality technical delivery, responsible AI implementation, and a culture of continuous innovation and engineering excellence.

Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• 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.

AI & Intelligent Systems Leadership

• 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).

Engineering Excellence & Modern Practices

• 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.

Operational Excellence & DevSecOps

• 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).

Thought Leadership & Innovation

• 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.

Talent, Culture & Change Leadership

• 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.

Budgeting & Partner Management

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

Characteristics We Seek

• 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.

Qualifications

Education:

• 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.