Principal Engineer

Join Appnovation Technologies as a Principal Engineer, where you will own the technical coherence of an enterprise marketing technology ecosystem for our life sciences clients. In this senior technical leadership role, you will set a clear technical direction across multiple platform teams, lead architecture reviews, and own the technical strategy for tracing content and performance data. You will also partner with client experience leaders to shape new AI-enabled patient and healthcare professional experiences.

• Define and own a clear technical approach across content creation, governance, approval, publishing, experience delivery, and measurement.
• Set shared standards for API contracts, metadata and taxonomy, data governance, and security across multiple platform teams.
• Lead architecture reviews and decisions across platform teams, acting as the escalation point for cross-team problems.

• You can explain complex technical solutions to technical and non-technical audiences and connect them to measurable business value
• You have a customer-first mindset and a devotion to customer service
• Experience building something new in a regulated environment and getting it approved and live, not just piloted
• Technical Strategy and Judgment: Connects business needs, platform strategy and emerging technology into a practical direction, and is honest about which problems need a new approach and which are already solved
• Outside-In Thinking: Tracks what is emerging in AI, healthcare technology and the wider industry, and translates it into what it means for clients, patients and HCPs
• Experience designing patient-facing or clinician-facing technology, or a clear view of how to handle the extra duty of care it brings
• Prior experience and connections in the Life Sciences industry is preferred
• You have prior experience in consulting
• Real depth in three or four areas of the marketing technology stack (web and experience delivery, email, paid media, analytics and measurement, AI, content supply chain, consent and identity, audience data, enterprise cloud) and working knowledge of the rest
• Responsible AI Mindset: Designs for auditability, evidence and safety from the start so new approaches can pass review in a regulated setting
• Demonstrated ability to lead without positional authority, setting direction for teams you don't manage and making it stick
• 12+ years of software and platform engineering experience, with a track record of designing systems that span organizational boundaries, not just technical ones
• Proven success getting multiple engineering roadmaps to line up around shared data contracts and standards
• Hands-on depth in applied AI: how assistants and agents consume services, tool and context interfaces such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), retrieval over approved content, and the evaluation, guardrails and traceability needed before a generative system talks to a patient or HCP
• You are responsive and thrive in a fast-paced, diverse, high-performance environment with rapidly changing business needs
• Technical Depth and Breadth: Brings hands-on credibility to guide engineers, challenge assumptions and make sound platform-scale choices
• Thank you for your interest in a career with Appnovation Technologies! Please note that only those selected for an interview will be contacted
• Experience integrating with partner and third-party platforms where the surface, data boundary and release cycle are outside your control
• You engage and build positive internal and external client relationships, while managing multiple initiatives, often with competing priorities
• You are the person people bring the hard questions to, and you are comfortable in that role
• Influence and Partnership: Builds alignment and drives decisions across teams and organizations without relying on formal authority
• You have solid analytical, problem-solving and decision-making skills
• You actively seek out things outside your comfort zone and rapidly learn new concepts, business models and technologies
• You are able to travel to client and Appnovation locations as needed
• Excellent communication skills, including explaining complex technical topics in plain language to senior leaders and building agreement across organizational lines
• You set high standards for quality, performance, scalability and security and seek continuous improvement
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Commercial fluency with enterprise vendor agreements, licensing and consumption models, and the judgment to spot when a platform’s cost curve, not its capability, is the real constraint
• Content supply chain experience: digital asset management, metadata and taxonomy, workflow management, promotional review and approval, claims libraries and content reuse
• Experience with cloud and edge infrastructure such as AWS and Cloudflare, enterprise GenAI services, identity and API gateways, and custom middleware and integration patterns
• Experience with enterprise platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Workfront, Veeva Vault and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Understanding the category and its trade-offs matters more than any one product
• Experience in pharma, life sciences or another regulated industry with defined promotional review, privacy and security requirements
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