Lead Technical Architect

Position Overview

Cardinality.ai builds and operates modern health and human services systems — including Medicaid programs — for state government agencies. We are hiring a Technical Lead to lead the development team on our Wyoming engagement — owning day-to-day technical execution, setting the technical direction of the work, and being accountable for delivery.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will write code, review code, unblock your team, and make the architectural calls that keep the project moving. You will not do it alone: you will have Cardinality’s extended platform, architecture, security, and DevOps teams behind you.

Our applications are built on Empower, Cardinality’s own configurable application platform, with business logic externalized into Drools and automation orchestrated through n8n. No candidate arrives knowing Empower — we will teach you. What we need is someone who has built and led real production software, is comfortable working through configuration, rules, and workflow rather than only code, and can pick up a new platform quickly and deeply.

About the Work

• The system handles protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII), and operates under state and federal security and privacy requirements. Security is a first-class design constraint, not a late-stage checklist.
• Work is delivered on Empower, Cardinality’s configurable platform. A large share of functionality is delivered through platform configuration; the rest is custom extension code, integrations, data work, and reporting. Understanding where that line falls — and holding it — is a core part of this role.
• Business logic is externalized into a rules engine (Drools) and orchestrated workflows (n8n) rather than buried in application code. Expect to spend real time in rules and workflow design, not only in TypeScript.
• Integration on this engagement is primarily real-time APIs and scheduled, file-based exchange over SFTP.
• You will work alongside business analysts, product owners, QA, DevOps, data, and security teams, plus state agency stakeholders and partner vendors.

What You Will DoLead the Team

• Lead the development team: assign and sequence work, set technical standards, and be accountable for what ships and when.
• Break down epics and features into implementable work, estimate credibly, and keep the team unblocked.
• Run code reviews and hold a consistent quality bar across the team.
• Mentor developers, grow the team’s capability on the platform, and raise problems early rather than late.
• Represent the development team in planning, backlog refinement, and stakeholder discussions — and translate between technical constraints and business needs.

Own the Technical Direction

• Propose and drive architecture and design decisions for the engagement, with support from the extended internal architecture team.
• Evaluate build-versus-configure tradeoffs on the Empower platform and choose the approach that is maintainable, not just fastest.
• Identify and pay down technical debt deliberately; keep the codebase something the next developer can work in.
• Document decisions, technical designs, API specifications, data mappings, and integration flows so they survive turnover.

Build

• Design, develop, and maintain application functionality across the stack using TypeScript, NestJS, and Angular.
• Build reusable services, components, and REST APIs.
• Work with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and with data formats including JSON, XML, CSV, fixed-width, and other flat files.
• Build and deploy on AWS, including S3, Cognito, and QuickSight.
• Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across application, integration, rules, and data layers.

Business Rules and Workflow Automation

• Author, test, and maintain business rules in Drools — translating policy and program requirements into rules that analysts can reason about, and keeping rule sets organized, versioned, and testable as policy changes.
• Design, build, and operate automation and orchestration workflows in n8n, including scheduling, branching, retries, and failure handling.
• Hold the line on where logic belongs — platform configuration, rules engine, workflow, or application code — so behavior stays discoverable and changeable without a full release.

Integrations

• Own the engagement’s integrations end to end.
• Build and maintain file processing pipelines: transfer, ingestion, parsing, schema and business validation, data mapping and transformation, loading, and generation of outbound extracts.
• Design integrations to fail safely and visibly — idempotent and re-runnable processing, partial-failure and bad-record handling, duplicate and out-of-order file detection, reconciliation and control totals, alerting, and a clear operational path to reprocess.
• Coordinate with partner and agency technical teams on file specifications, layouts, cutover, and troubleshooting; document the specs and data mappings so they are maintainable by others.
• Handle transfers securely: key-based SFTP authentication and key rotation, encryption in transit and at rest, and appropriate retention and disposal of files containing PHI/PII.
• Support API-based and event-driven integration patterns as they arise.

Build It Securely

• Design and build with PHI and PII protection as a starting constraint — least privilege, data minimization, encryption in transit and at rest, and complete audit logging.
• Follow and enforce secure SDLC practices: threat-informed design, secure coding standards, dependency and vulnerability management, secrets handling, and remediation of findings from SAST, DAST, and penetration tests.
• Implement and maintain controls that satisfy applicable state and federal security requirements, including the ARC-AMPE control framework, HIPAA, and state-specific security and privacy requirements. You will have security and compliance support — but the code you lead has to hold up to audit.
• Implement authentication and authorization correctly, including OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT, and role-based access control.

Quality and Delivery

• Own the team’s testing approach across unit, integration, API, and end-to-end testing, using tools such as Jest, Postman, Swagger/OpenAPI, and Playwright.
• Work within CI/CD pipelines
• Participate in production support and incident response for the systems your team builds.

What We Are Looking For

Required:

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, still hands-on in the code today.
• Demonstrated experience leading a development team — setting direction, reviewing others’ work, and being accountable for delivery, whether or not the title said "lead."
• Strong TypeScript, with production experience in NestJS (or a comparable Node.js framework such as Express or Fastify) and Angular (or React with willingness to work in Angular).
• Strong experience designing, building, and consuming REST APIs.
• Solid relational database skills, including schema design and query performance; PostgreSQL preferred.
• Practical AWS experience building and deploying applications.
• Hands-on experience building batch or file-based integrations — SFTP or equivalent scheduled file exchange, flat-file parsing and generation, data mapping and transformation, validation, error handling, and reconciliation.
• Working knowledge of application security fundamentals — OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT, RBAC, the OWASP Top 10, and secure handling of sensitive data.
• Experience with Git-based workflows, CI/CD, automated testing, and supporting your own code in production.
• Strong written and verbal communication. You will explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders regularly.
• Comfort externalizing business logic into rules engines and orchestration tools rather than hard-coding it, and sound judgment about where a given piece of logic belongs.
• Willingness to learn a proprietary platform deeply and work within its patterns rather than around them.

Preferred:

• Medicaid experience — building or supporting software for a state Medicaid program, such as MMIS or Medicaid Enterprise Systems (MES) modules, eligibility and enrollment, provider management and screening, care management, or claims and encounter processing. Familiarity with the Medicaid technical and regulatory landscape: CMS certification (Streamlined Modular Certification or Outcomes-Based Certification), MITA, CMS Conditions for Enhanced Funding and modularity expectations, or T-MSIS reporting.
• Experience with a business rules engine — Drools specifically, or comparable tools such as Camunda DMN, IBM ODM, or Red Hat Decision Manager.
• Experience with workflow automation or orchestration tooling — n8n specifically, or comparable tools such as Temporal, Airflow, Camunda, Zapier, or Make.
• Experience with configurable, low-code, or metadata-driven application platforms.
• Experience delivering software in another regulated environment — healthcare, human services, government, or similar.
• Experience building software for state or federal government agencies, or as a government contractor.
• Experience with regulated data and compliance frameworks: HIPAA, HITRUST, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, or ARC-AMPE.
• AWS Cognito, S3, and QuickSight specifically; Lambda, API Gateway, SQS/SNS, or EventBridge more broadly.
• Data migration and legacy system modernization experience.
• Reporting and analytics work — QuickSight, or comparable BI tooling.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging technologies.

Position Details

• Employment type: Full-time/Contract.
• Location: Fully remote. No travel required.
• Background check: This role supports a state government program. Employment is contingent on successfully completing a background check.

Why This Role

• Real ownership. You lead the team and set the technical direction, with senior support available rather than imposed.
• Work that matters. The systems you build are used to deliver services to people who depend on them.
• Depth over churn. This is a long-lived product, so the quality decisions you make actually compound.