Technical Lead, Learning Platforms
About this role
About The Role
Altarum is seeking a Technical Lead, Learning Platforms to provide hands-on technical leadership for the Direct Care Careers (DCC) platform, a multi-tenant workforce platform connecting direct care workers with employers across participating states.
This is a senior, hands-on engineering role for an experienced developer with strong web application development skills and meaningful experience working with learning management systems (LMS). You will spend significant time designing, coding, reviewing, and improving production software while guiding the day-to-day technical work of the engineering team.
You will partner closely with product and platform leadership to translate business needs into technical solutions, improve development practices, and ensure the platform remains scalable, maintainable, secure, and accessible. You will also help the team make effective use of AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering workflows.
What You'll Do
- Write, review, test, and ship production-quality code as a senior, hands-on member of the engineering team.
Lead the day-to-day technical work of developers through code reviews, technical guidance, mentoring, and engineering standards. - Design, build, and maintain integrations involving learning management systems, including SSO, APIs, learning content standards, and related data flows.
- Implement and maintain platform features, state-specific configurations, and reusable functionality within a shared multi-client environment.
- Partner with platform leadership on technical architecture and implementation decisions, raising risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs early.
- Lead strong development practices around branching, releases, automated testing, CI/CD, documentation, performance, security, and accessibility, including WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 requirements.
- Facilitate Agile team practices, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, and retrospectives, while helping manage sprint commitments, team capacity, and delivery goals.
- Partner with product owners and product managers to break work into clear, estimable stories and maintain a ready, prioritized backlog.
- Help remove technical blockers and identify practical solutions that keep delivery moving.
- Use AI-assisted development tools for coding, testing, review, documentation, automation, and other appropriate development workflows.
- Help establish responsible and effective standards for the team’s use of AI development tools.
- Integrate identity and access solutions using technologies and standards such as Auth0, OIDC, SAML, or similar approaches.
- Clearly communicate and present technical decisions, implementation progress, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations to technical and nontechnical stakeholders, including product, program, executive, client, and state-agency audiences.
- Contribute technical input to estimates, solutioning, build-versus-buy decisions, and future platform capabilities.
- Document technical decisions and implementations so knowledge is shared across the team and does not depend on any one individual.
What You'll Bring
- 7+ years of professional software development experience, with significant recent hands-on coding experience.
- Strong experience developing and maintaining production web applications using modern development technologies and frameworks.
- Hands-on experience with PHP and the ability to work effectively across multiple technologies and languages as needed.
- Strong experience building, extending, or integrating learning management systems (LMS), including APIs, SSO, learning content standards, and related data flows.
- Experience leading developers technically while continuing to contribute directly to the codebase.
- Strong experience with APIs, third-party integrations, and identity and access technologies such as OIDC or SAML.
- Experience working in a multi-tenant, multi-client, or shared-platform environment.
- Demonstrated experience with automated testing, version control, CI/CD, and modern software development practices.
- Experience working in Scrum, Agile, or a similar iterative delivery model.
- Practical experience using AI-assisted development tools, such as AI coding assistants, LLM-based automation, or agentic development workflows, with sound judgment about where these tools add value.
- Ability to explain technical concepts, implementation decisions, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and nontechnical audiences.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
What Will Set You Apart
- Experience with Moodle, including custom plugins, integrations, configuration, or platform extensions.
- Experience with Drupal or another PHP-based CMS, including custom module or theme development.
- Experience building or integrating AI/LLM capabilities into production applications, including considerations related to evaluation and responsible use.
- Experience with reporting, business intelligence tools, analytics, or data pipelines.
- Experience supporting government, health care, human services, or public-sector technology programs.
- Familiarity with long-term services and supports (LTSS), home- and community-based services (HCBS), or direct care workforce programs.
- Experience working with state agencies or cross-functional teams that include product, program, policy, data, security, and vendor partners.
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), or similar Agile
The following experience would be especially valuable but is not required:
Why Join Our Team?
In this role, you will have the opportunity to combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership while helping evolve a platform designed to strengthen the direct care workforce.
You will work closely with a collaborative, mission-driven team and have meaningful influence over how the platform is built, how the engineering team works, and how modern development practices, including AI-assisted development, are adopted responsibly and effectively.
If you are a strong, versatile developer who enjoys solving complex problems, working across technologies, improving engineering practices, mentoring others, and staying close to the code, we’d love to hear from you.
Where You'll Work
Remote with occasional in-person collaboration days.
If you’re near one of our offices (Silver Spring, MD; or Novi, MI), you’ll be Hybrid and will join us in person one day every other month (6 times per year) for a fun, purpose-driven Collaboration Day. These days are filled with creative energy, meaningful connection, and team brainstorming.
Non-local employees will join these days virtually and may be asked to join us occasionally in-person.
Altarum is a nonprofit organization focused on improving the health of individuals with fewer financial resources and populations disenfranchised by the health care system. We work primarily on behalf of federal and state governments to design and implement solutions that achieve measurable results. We combine our expertise in public health and health care delivery with technology development and implementation, practice transformation, training and technical assistance, quality improvement, data analytics, and applied research and evaluation. Our innovative solutions and proven processes lead to better value and health for all.
Altarum is an equal opportunity employer that provides employment and opportunities to all qualified employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Originally posted on Himalayas
