Contract Software Engineering Manager Jobs in Iowa

About VIDA

VIDA is the global leader in AI-powered Biomarker Intelligence Solutions. We use our secure, cloud-native medical imaging technology to create quantitative imaging biomarkers. Our engineering teams sit at the intersection of large-scale data processing, AI/ML, and distributed computer vision workloads.

This position is Hybrid out of our Coralville, IA or Edina, MN office.

Role Overview

As a Software Engineering Manager at VIDA, you will have a strong technical depth in cloud-native, distributed data processing systems – high-throughout, horizontally scalable architectures capable of processing millions to billions of events, managing fan-out/fan-in workflows, and orchestrating large-scale data movement across distributed compute clusters. In this role, you will manage and grow a team of backend and platform engineers responsible for building VIDA’s distributed compute and data backbone: high-volume ingestion pipelines, scalable workflow engines, secure data storage layers, and AI/ML-supporting infrastructure for the VIDA Intelligence Platform and VIDA Biobank. You’ll partner closely with Product, Data Science, QA, Security, and Operations to deliver highly reliable, compliant, multi-tenant systems that support pharma trials, large-scale imaging research, and next-generation AI workloads.

As a Software Engineering Manager, your key responsibilities will be:

Team Leadership & Delivery

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of software engineers focused on backend services, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Build and engineering culture grounded in reliability, observability, automation, and high accountability.
• Drive execution of critical platform initiatives: scalable DICOM ingestion, distributed workflow orchestration, batch data processing pipelines, and date lake/lakehouse systems.
• Ensure Engineering best practices across code quality, testing, CI/CD, IaC, and operational readiness.

Technical Ownership & Architecture

• Provide strong hands-on technical guidance in system design, distributed systems patterns, and cloud-native architecture.
• Own the reliability and performance of distributed components such as:
  • Event-driven pipelines (Kinesis, Kafka, Pub/Sub equivalents)
  • Workflow orchestration (Step Functions, Temporal, Airflow)
  • Scalable microservices for multi-tenant data access
• Collaborate with senior architects and the VP of Engineering on platform roadmaps and architectural evolution.
• Champion modern distributed systems practices including idempotent operations, partitioning, caching, backpressure management, and autoscaling.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work with Product Management to break down features into clear technical plans and deliverable increments.
• Partner with Data Science/ML teams to support model training, inference workflows, and large-scale compute jobs.
• Coordinate with Security, Compliance, and DevOps to ensure systems meet HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR, and GxP standards.
• Collaborate with Customer Success and Support teams to diagnose issues and improve platform-level SLAs.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building large-scale backend or distributed systems; 2+ years managing or leading technical teams.
• Deep experience with cloud-native distributed architectures (AWS preferred).
• Hands-on knowledge of:
  • Event-driven systems (Kafka/Kinesis/PubSub)
  • Microservices at scale (ECS/EKS/Lambda)
  • Distributed data storage (S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Delta Lake)
  • Workflow orchestration frameworks
  • LLM Coding tools (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or Gemini Antigravity
• Strong design and distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, caching, backpressure, idempotency, retries, stream processing.
• Proficient in modern programming languages (Python, Go, Java, or similar).
• Experience building or managing multi-tenant SaaS systems with strict SLAs.
• Experience operating systems in compliance-sensitive environments (healthcare, finance, enterprise SaaS).
• Strong experience with aligning teams to adopt AI assisted programming methodologies

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with medical imaging, DICOM, or AI/ML data processing.
• Familiarity with lakehouse architectures, Databricks, large-scale batch compute platforms.

All VIDA employees are expected to be flexible and have an entrepreneurial mindset.  Other duties may be assigned as needed. In addition, VIDA offers a wide selection of benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision), retirement planning (401k), and paid time off to name a few. 

VIDA is an equal opportunity employer.  Qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran’s status, age or disability.