NextPatient

**Target Role:** Staff Software Engineer — Legacy Integration & Platform Architecture (Ruby/Rails) **Company:** NextPatient **Comp Range:** $250,000 — $300,000 / yr (Remote, Full-time) **Lead Record:** [`wwworkremote` Posting #5048](http://localhost:31000/api/v0/job_postings/5048) **Tone Calibration:** Understated, fact-dense, zero-fluff. Written for engineering leadership & technical screeners. --- ## 1. Mission & Architectural Alignment NextPatient’s mandate—**decoupling modern patient experiences (scheduling, check-in, waitlists, payments) from dated, legacy doctor’s office EHR systems**—is a direct match for my 25+ year track record in **System Cartography, legacy subsystem decoupling, and zero-downtime platform safety**. ### Why This Match Works (3 Grounded Signals): 1. **Legacy Healthcare System Integration**: Recently conducted a 90-day system cartography and operational risk assessment for EMR-Bear (a multi-tenant healthcare SaaS serving 130+ clinics following a founder transition). Established release verification gates across deployment pipelines to protect clinical uptime and HIPAA compliance boundaries. 2. **Strangler-Fig Decoupling & API Boundary Design**: At OneMain Financial, refactored high-volume financial customer acquisition flows spanning legacy database layers, multi-service Rails state machines, and third-party API supply chains—eliminating hidden lateral state mutations and reducing outage MTTR by 60%. 3. **OpenTelemetry & Dark Telemetry Illumination**: Founded and technically led the enterprise OpenTelemetry initiative at OneMain, converting dark legacy microservice behavior into empirical telemetry and quantifiable risk governance. --- ## 2. Fit Matrix & Seniority Calibration | Dimension | NextPatient Expectation | Mike's Grounded Evidence | Fit Evaluation | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | **Legacy Integration** | Plug modern SaaS into legacy EHRs without breaking live clinical operations. | 130+ clinical SaaS environments stabilized; strangler-fig API decoupling across financial monoliths. | 🟢 **Direct Match** | | **Backend & Stack** | Heavy Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, background jobs, zero-downtime migrations. | 25+ years Ruby/Rails, PostgreSQL (including pgvector), Sidekiq/Redis, AWS/Kubernetes. | 🟢 **Core Stack Match** | | **Platform Ownership** | Staff IC leadership, responsibility realignment, developer velocity enablement. | Founded and technically led ACQ Enablement team at OneMain; led cross-team architecture reviews. | 🟢 **Staff/Principal IC Match** | | **Culture & Alumni** | High technical autonomy, async documentation, craftsmanship rigor. | Groupon alumnus; founded Software Craftsmanship McHenry County (820+ members); author of *Panoramic View*. | 🟢 **Cultural Parity** | --- ## 3. Proven Case Studies for NextPatient Leadership 1. **EMR-Bear 90-Day Risk Cartography & Clinical Governance (2026)**: - *Challenge*: Multi-tenant healthcare SaaS serving 130+ clinics faced operational risk during a founder exit. - *Action*: Reconstructed end-to-end dependency models (interaction surface to database locks) and instituted deployment release gates prior to HIPAA compliance review. - *Outcome*: Zero clinical downtime during founder transition; delivered empirical risk roadmap for platform modernization. - *Reference*: [case-studies/index.html#emr-bear-stabilization](https://www.just3ws.com/case-studies/) 2. **OneMain Financial Acquisition Lane Realignment (2021–2026)**: - *Challenge*: Implicit lateral state mutations across multi-step Rails state machines caused persistent data corruptions in high-volume loan acquisition flows. - *Action*: Refactored workflow state transitions, founded ACQ Enablement to protect remediation work, and deployed enterprise OpenTelemetry tracing across microservice boundaries. - *Outcome*: Reduced MTTR by ~60%, unblocked 4 parallel engineering streams, and eliminated outage cascades. - *Reference*: [case-studies/index.html#onemain-acquisition](https://www.just3ws.com/case-studies/) --- ## 4. Archival Technical Discussions & Provenance To evaluate my approach to software craftsmanship, legacy modernization, and technical community leadership: - 🎥 **Software Craftsmanship Retrospective**: [Software Craftsmanship McHenry County Retrospective](https://www.just3ws.com/history/) - 👤 **Panoramic View Architecture Methodology**: [The Panoramic View Discipline](https://www.just3ws.com/panoramic-view/) --- ## 5. Direct Outreach Strategy - **Primary Recruiter**: Sarah Fox (Senior Technical Recruiter, Ex-AWS, Ex-Groupon). - **Outreach Angle**: Lead with common Groupon alumni context + direct evidence of plugging modern Rails interfaces into legacy 130+ clinic healthcare platforms without clinical downtime.