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Overview

Northwoods Consulting Partners is a stable, domain-specialized vertical software provider serving state and local Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies across the United States. The company’s mission is to enable caseworkers to focus on More Peoplework. Less Paperwork. The product suite is anchored by Traverse: a cloud-native SaaS platform designed for casework, field visits, and documentation; and Compass: an industry-leading on-premise document management system.

The Opportunity

Northwoods is seeking an experienced VP of Engineering to join its executive team. The successful candidate will act as the senior Engineering leader, responsible for driving business growth through technology innovation, setting quality benchmarks, standardizing practices, and building a more durable Engineering organization.

This leader will oversee the consolidation and modernization of a bifurcated technology stack, ensuring excellence in security, operations, and modern software development practices and will work across the company to align the technology strategy with business objectives.

Responsibilities and Strategic Priorities

The VP of Engineering will serve as a strategic technology leader and visionary for Northwoods, driving the engineering organization’s architecture, product roadmap, and operational excellence. This role requires deep technical leadership across AWS cloud infrastructure, Ruby and React-based SaaS development, and the application of emerging AI technologies—coupled with an understanding of the complex data and compliance requirements of U.S. State Health and Human Services systems.

The VP of Engineering will be responsible for defining and executing a multi-year strategy focused on:

• I. Strategy and Architectural Leadership
  • Define a unifying engineering strategy and roadmap for managing the success of customers, leveraging Compass and Traverse while designing our next-generation offerings with an AI-first mindset.
  • Establish clear architectural governance and set consistent technical direction across the entire product portfolio.
• II. Technology Modernization and Delivery
  • Drive the evaluation and standardization of CI/CD practices and modern DevOps pipelines to enable scalable, efficient SaaS delivery.
  • Lead the adoption and institutionalization of a GenAI-assisted approach to increase engineering throughput.
  • Advance the use of GenAI and emerging technologies within the product to benefit customers and the next generation of products.
• III. Organizational Development and Efficiency
  • Evaluate and refine the engineering organization to ensure an effective structure, strong leadership, and a culture that fosters innovation, continuous skill development, and scalable growth.
  • Implement continuous improvement in AWS operations, monitoring, services, cost profiles, and core engineering processes.
  • Set measurable engineering goals that track output, identify improvement opportunities, and drive accountability.
• IV. Security and Compliance
  • Implement continuous improvement in the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDLC) while supporting compliance and industry-standard practices.
  • Oversee incident response, vulnerability management, and security posture.
  • Lead Business Continuity (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DRP) readiness efforts.
• V. Health and Human Services Expertise
  • Align Northwoods products with state HHS regulations and case management needs.
  • Lead interoperability efforts with systems like SACWIS, CCWIS, Medicaid, and SNAP/TANF.
  • Maintain awareness of federal and state technology frameworks (ACF, CMS, NIEM, NC Child Welfare Data Framework).

Required Skills and Experience

• Extensive experience (10+ years) in senior engineering leadership roles, such as VP of Engineering, Director of Engineering, or similar.

• Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, particularly the AWS ecosystem: EKS, EC2, Lambda, PostgreSQL, S3, and related services.

• Proven technical depth in the current modern stack: Ruby on Rails, React/TypeScript, and modern CI/CD.

• Experience in managing, maintaining, and modernizing C# / .NET Framework applications and complex installer/deployment tooling (MSI, WiX).

• Prior experience with security compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA) and implementing preventative security controls (SAST, SCA).

• Demonstrated ability to drive cultural change, adopt new technologies, such as Generative AI.

• 3–5 years of experience managing offshore teams.

• 2–3 years of experience leveraging AI to support the SDLC process to improve team efficiency with working examples.

• Working experience using Cursor, Microsoft Co-Pilot, GitHub or similar AI tools in coding practice with measurable results.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and performance-based incentives.
• Opportunity to work with a passionate and talented team on cutting-edge technologies.
• Continuous learning and career development opportunities.

The expected base salary for this position is: USD $225,000 - $250,000, plus performance related bonus, excluding equity. Salary is based on a number of factors including market conditions, location and may vary depending on job-related skills and experience.