Principal Software Engineering Lead (eCOA) - Evinova
About this opportunity
WHY JOIN US?
Evinova is a health-tech business focused on accelerating better health outcomes by advancing digital transformation across the life sciences sector. By combining science-based expertise, evidence-led rigor, and deep human insight, we design digital solutions that enable healthcare to work better for everyone.
Operating at the intersection of healthcare, technology, data, and analytics, we are helping unlock the full potential of digital health, transforming how clinical research is conducted, how care is delivered, and how patients experience healthcare. Our solutions are built to scale, driving efficiency, improving decision-making, and ultimately delivering better outcomes for patients worldwide.
At Evinova, we are driven by a shared purpose to transform health through data and digital innovation. Our teams collaborate across disciplines to solve complex challenges, continuously learning and evolving in a fast-paced, high-impact environment.
We also recognize the importance of flexibility and balance. Our ways of working support both individual needs and team collaboration. To foster connection and collaboration, employees are expected to work from the office three days per week, creating opportunities for in-person teamwork, innovation, and meaningful connection.
This role can be based in Gaithersburg, MD, or Boston, MA.
About Our Engineering Organization
Our Product Engineering organization consists of cross-functional squads with the people and skills needed to deliver innovative digital products to patients and healthcare providers in clinical trials worldwide. We ship on quarterly program increments using agile methodology.We are proud to have one of the strongest software development teams in the health tech space, with deep technical and domain skills. This is a place where you build real things, solve hard problems, and grow alongside engineers who care deeply about their craft and its purpose.
About the Role
This is not a traditional management role. We are looking for a hands-on engineering leader who writes and reviews code, makes architecture decisions in pull requests, and leads by building alongside their team. You will own the technical direction and delivery of our eCOA product area while leading a multi-squad engineering organization.
You will spend a significant portion of your time in the codebase: reviewing pull requests, pairing with engineers on complex problems, evaluating AI-assisted development workflows, and ensuring our architecture scales. The remainder of your time is spent on team development, cross-functional collaboration, and technical strategy.
We expect you to be the strongest technical voice in the room on your product area, someone who can credibly challenge an architectural decision, spot issues in a code review, and prototype solutions to unblock the team.
Key Responsibilities
Hands-On Technical Leadership (50%+ of your time)
Regularly review pull requests, provide substantive code-level feedback, and enforce quality standards across squads.
Make and own architectural decisions for the eCOA platform, including API design, data models, service boundaries, and infrastructure choices.
Write production code, particularly for complex or foundational components where your expertise accelerates the team.
Pair with engineers on difficult problems and use these sessions as coaching opportunities.
Drive adoption of AI-assisted development tools and workflows, establishing team conventions for AI code generation, prompt engineering, and automated testing.
Define and enforce technical standards: testing strategy, CI/CD pipeline health, observability, and deployment practices.
AI-Native Engineering Culture
Embed AI tools (coding assistants, agentic workflows, automated code review) into the team’s daily development process as a force multiplier, not an experiment.
Evaluate and integrate AI capabilities into the eCOA product itself, including intelligent data capture, adaptive questionnaire logic, and patient experience personalization.
Champion a culture where engineers own AI-generated output with the same rigor as hand-written code: thorough review, testing, and accountability.
Stay current with rapid advances in AI-assisted development and translate those into practical team-level improvements.
Team Leadership & Development
Lead, mentor, and grow a multi-squad engineering organization. Develop squad leads into strong technical leaders in their own right.
Set a high technical bar in hiring: personally conduct technical interviews and assess candidates’ ability to build, not just describe.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement, psychological safety, and intellectual honesty about technical debt and tradeoffs.
Manage performance with clear, measurable expectations rooted in engineering output and quality, not just process compliance.
Product & Delivery
Partner closely with Product Owners and Product leadership to translate clinical and customer requirements into sound technical plans, ensuring feasibility, scalability, and regulatory compliance.
Serve as a senior engineering representative for Evinova’s Unified Trials product in North America, providing technical leadership and representing the engineering organization with key stakeholders.
Act as a primary engineering point of contact for the Product team, bringing a strong technical perspective to product strategy, roadmap discussions, prioritization, and key customer or business needs.
Drive execution against quarterly program increments with predictable, high-quality delivery, balancing product priorities with technical quality, scalability, and long-term platform health.
Partner across the Unified Trials Product and Engineering organizations to drive technical alignment, consistency, and reuse of shared platform capabilities across squads.
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent demonstrated through professional experience
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and shipping production systems.
3+ years leading engineering teams (squads, chapters, or similar) while remaining hands-on with code.
Deep proficiency in at least one of our core stacks: React/React Native (frontend), Node.js/Java (backend), AWS cloud services.
Demonstrated ability to make sound architectural decisions across frontend, backend, and infrastructure.
Practical, daily experience using AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, or similar) in your own coding workflow.
Strong understanding of agile delivery frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) applied in practice, not just theory.
Desired Qualifications
Experience building or deploying AI/ML features in production applications, including agentic AI systems or LLM integrations.
Experience developing and delivering electronic Clinical Outcome Assessments (eCOA) or patient-facing clinical trial software.
Familiarity with GxP, SaMD validation, or regulated software development processes.
Experience with remote patient monitoring (RPM) solutions including patient-reported data and clinician-facing visualizations.
Contributions to open-source projects or a visible track record of technical thought leadership (blog posts, conference talks, published architectural decisions).
Clinical research domain experience.
What This Role Is Not
A pure people-management position where you are removed from the codebase. If you haven’t written or reviewed code in the past month, this role is not the right fit.
A project management role. We have Product Owners and delivery support for process coordination. You own the technical how, not the project timeline.
A checkbox exercise in AI adoption. We need someone who has genuinely transformed their own development workflow with AI tools and can credibly lead others to do the same.
SO, WHAT’S NEXT?
To be considered for this exciting opportunity, please complete the full application on our website at your earliest convenience – it is the only way that our Recruiter and Hiring Manager can know that you feel well qualified for this opportunity. If you know someone who would be a great fit, please share this posting with them.
Where can I find out more?
Explore what we’re building: www.evinova.com
Stay connected and see our impact in action: https://www.linkedin.com/company/evinova/
Apply today to bring smarter, faster clinical trials to life!
Evinova is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion and providing a workplace that is free from discrimination. Evinova is committed to accommodating persons with disabilities. Such accommodation is available on request in respect of all aspects of the recruitment, assessment and selection process and may be requested by emailing AZCHumanResources@astrazeneca.com .
#LI-Hybrid
The annual base pay for this position ranges from $166,000 - $225,000 USD. Base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
In addition, our positions offer a short-term incentive bonus opportunity; eligibility to participate in our equity-based long-term incentive program. Benefits offered included a qualified retirement program [401(k) plan]; paid vacation and holidays; paid leaves; and, health benefits including medical, prescription drug, dental, and vision coverage in accordance with the terms and conditions of the applicable plans.
Additional details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment. If hired, employee will be in an “at-will position” and the Company reserves the right to modify base pay (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.
Date Posted
11-Aug-2026
Closing Date
03-Sept-2026 Our mission is to build an inclusive environment where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and employees. In furtherance of that mission, we welcome and consider applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of their protected characteristics. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please complete the corresponding section in the application form.
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Information Technology role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 367 comparable Principal Information Technology roles across 36 biopharma companies.
Salary context
46 of 367 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 367 comparable roles
+ 14 more countries
Seniority mix
367 of 367 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
1 of 367 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.