When people think about high-performing engineering teams, they often picture intensity, long hours, and relentless pressure. Performance at all costs.
That’s not the engineering culture we’re building at 1upHealth.
We’re building a high-performing, high-joy engineering culture. I believe those two qualities belong together. In fact, I don’t think you can achieve sustained excellence without both.
Our mission is to make it easy to acquire, manage, and use healthcare data. That’s meaningful, complex work. Payers rely on accurate, interoperable data to power analytics, meet regulatory requirements, and drive better outcomes. The infrastructure behind that data has to be reliable, scalable, and secure. The stakes are real.
To meet that bar, culture cannot be accidental. It has to be intentional.
Empathy and Execution Are Not Opposites
At the core of our engineering organization is a simple philosophy: High Empathy and High Execution.
Some leaders treat these as tradeoffs. I see them as partners.
Empathy is about understanding the humans behind the code. It’s about listening, creating psychological safety, and making sure people feel supported and trusted. It shows up in how we run meetings, how we give feedback, and how we approach growth and development.
Execution is about delivering. It’s about setting a high bar and meeting it. It’s about building resilient systems, honoring commitments, and holding ourselves accountable to outcomes.
I say this often: empathy and execution are not competing priorities. When engineers feel trusted and supported, they take bigger swings, move faster, and build better systems. Excellence is a team sport.
We give people real agency and autonomy in how they approach problems. At the same time, we have high expectations of ourselves and each other. Ownership is real. Accountability is real. So is support.
Celebrate the Swings
Innovation requires courage.
We celebrate small wins because progress matters. We also celebrate big swings, even when they miss. A miss is only a true failure if we didn’t learn anything from it.
That’s why we’re intentional about retrospectives. Not just team retros, but project retros as well. We pause. We reflect. We ask what worked, what didn’t, and what we’ll do differently next time.
Getting one percent better every day may not sound glamorous, but it compounds. Over time, that commitment to learning creates extraordinary results. Excellence is not built on perfection. It’s built on iteration, feedback, and the willingness to improve.
And great ideas can come from anywhere. Any level. Any moment. Innovation doesn’t follow an org chart. Some of our best insights have come from the people closest to the problem.
Focus Wins
One of my favorite analogies is that engineering teams are like restaurants. If your menu is twenty pages long, you’re probably not earning Michelin stars. You might not even get five-star reviews.
Focus matters.
We choose clarity over clutter. We concentrate on the capabilities that matter most to payers who depend on our platform. By doing fewer things, better, we create space for craftsmanship. Engineers have time to think deeply, refine solutions, and raise the bar.
High performance doesn’t have to come at the expense of joy. In fact, when people are proud of what they’re building and feel trusted to build it well, joy becomes a natural byproduct.
That’s the culture we’re building at 1upHealth. High standards. High ownership. High joy.
And it’s how we will continue to transform how healthcare data works.
If you’re an engineer looking for a new opportunity and this blog resonates with you, check out our open positions.
