VP of Engineering · Regulated SaaS · Healthcare Technology · AI-Enabled Platforms

I've spent 20+ years building engineering teams in regulated industries: healthcare, financial services compliance, and federal VA/DoD programs. I've led a global organization of 250+ people with a $35M budget, shipped AI/ML into production, and grew engineering at a startup through its acquisition.

Healthcare is where I keep coming back. The work matters to patients, and that makes the hard parts worth it. But what I really do is the same anywhere: take an engineering org that's reactive or hard to see into, and make it predictable, measurable, and good at shipping.

I still build things myself. It keeps my judgment honest, and it's how I figured out what AI-assisted engineering is actually good for before asking my teams to adopt it.

Open to: VP / Head of Engineering and Senior Director roles in regulated SaaS, healthtech, and AI-enabled platforms. Remote or Philadelphia-area hybrid.

• Led a 250+ person engineering organization across North America, Europe, and APAC, with a $35M budget
• Scaled engineering from startup through acquisition, supporting 5x revenue growth over a decade
• Built an AI/ML compliance engine that reviews 2M+ advertising materials and cut manual review time 70%
• Cut operational costs 30% with cloud-native Azure architecture, and saved 15% of budget through vendor consolidation without losing delivery capacity
• Raised sprint throughput 30% while production defects dropped 18%; took deployments from hours to minutes
• Maintained SOC 2 Type II, HITRUST, and ISO 27001 compliance, with zero major SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit findings
• Cut time-to-hire 40% and built management layers so teams didn't depend on any one person
• Today: engineering for a platform used by 150+ VA Medical Centers, handling 1M+ behavioral health assessments a year

Change is always hard. The first time something gets difficult, people want to go back to the old way. My job is to keep everyone pointed at where we're going and keep rowing. I listen to the concerns, but I don't let a rough patch or a loud objection pull us off course.

Cutting vendor sprawl to one. Acquisitions had left us with overlapping vendors, each with a senior leader who preferred it. I pulled together the cost, usage, and support data, made the case to leadership, and we consolidated on a single vendor. That was part of a 15% budget savings, and the org became a lot simpler to manage.

Bringing Agile to teams that didn't want it. I've introduced sprints in several organizations, and there's always pushback at first. What wins people over isn't the process itself. It's the moment teams become predictable and leadership can see progress without a status meeting. At NantHealth that showed up as a 35% gain in delivery predictability, and at SAI360 as 40% more frequent releases. After that, nobody wanted to go back.

Splitting support from engineering. At NeuroFlow, the data showed 43% of the team's effort going to reactive work. I restructured into a dedicated production support team and an engineering team that owns escalations and permanent fixes, so new work could actually get done.

NeuroFlow / BHL, Engineering Leadership (2025 to present) Engineering for a federally regulated behavioral health platform serving 150+ VA Medical Centers and DoD-aligned programs.

• Delivered 12 of 14 roadmap milestones in my first six months, along with Year 1 of a major VA contract in full
• Built the operating model from nothing: 3 teams with clear ownership, a career framework, a sprint process, a release calendar, and a management layer
• Set up incident management: PagerDuty on-call, escalation policy, After Action Reviews, MTTR tracking, and SLOs in Dynatrace
• Made AI-assisted engineering part of how the team works, with 5 tools in daily use

RegEd, VP of Engineering (2023 to 2025)

• Led 250+ people across software, QA, DevOps, architecture, and program management, with a $35M budget
• Built and deployed an AI/ML compliance engine reviewing 2M+ advertising materials, cutting manual review 70%; led a RAG model that expanded the product line
• Moved teams to trunk-based development and feature flags: 30% higher throughput, 18% fewer production defects
• Cut operational costs 30% on Azure; consolidated vendors for 15% savings
• Set enterprise architecture standards and stood up an architecture group

NantHealth, Senior Director of Engineering (2021 to 2023)

• Ran engineering for healthcare analytics and clinical workflow products serving payers and providers
• Migrated legacy systems to Azure (40% faster) and built a central DevOps function that took deployments from hours to minutes
• Brought in Agile across teams (35% better predictability) and promoted 3 engineers into leadership

SAI360 / Strategic BCP, Head of Engineering, then Senior Director of Engineering (2011 to 2021)

• Grew engineering from startup through acquisition by SAI360, supporting 5x revenue growth
• Re-platformed our product onto SAI360's GRC platform within a year of the acquisition
• Introduced Agile and CI/CD: 40% more frequent releases, 60% smaller bug backlog, 30% faster time-to-market
• Passed every SOC 2 Type II audit with zero major findings

Earlier: Director of IT at Keane (2010 to 2011) and LA Weight Loss (2006 to 2010). Software Engineer at Aetna (2000 to 2006), working on payer operations, claims, and EDI integration.

I started using Claude Code on my own operational headaches, kept what worked, and rolled it out to the team. These are in real use, not demos:

Both are built with Claude Code, with the architecture and tests worked out before the UI.

• ContinuityCore: Self-hosted business continuity planning for small and mid-size businesses, built on ISO 22301 and NIST SP 800-34 (FastAPI, PostgreSQL). After ten years leading engineering for BCP software, I wanted to see what I'd build from a clean slate.
• HomeBase: A private, local-first home management app for desktop (Rust, Tauri, React, TypeScript, SQLite).

Cloud & Platform   Azure · AWS · AKS · Terraform · Azure DevOps · GitHub
Practices          Platform engineering · DevSecOps · CI/CD · Observability · AI-assisted SDLC
Compliance         HIPAA · HITECH · SOC 2 Type II · ISO 27001 · ISO 22301 · HITRUST · VA/DoD programs

📫 Happy to talk: LinkedIn · davidajacobus@gmail.com