I'm a physician assistant with several years of internal medicine and primary-care experience, along with a background in laboratory science. I'm considering a transition into software engineering, ideally in health tech, and I'm currently studying programming languages and core computer science concepts while planning to build several projects.
I'm especially interested in clinical workflows, healthcare data, medication safety, and tools designed for clinicians. For people working in health tech or anyone who has made a similar career change, is an initial software engineering salary around $120,000 realistic without a CS degree but with substantial clinical experience? Should I expect to start in a lower-paying junior role first?
What would be the most valuable way to demonstrate that I'm hireable: a strong portfolio, certifications, open-source contributions, networking, healthcare-specific projects, or something else?
3 Answers
There’s a lot more to becoming employable than learning a programming language. You’ll likely need to become comfortable with one practical stack, version control, databases, APIs, testing, deployment, basic networking, security practices, and how front-end and back-end systems communicate. A degree isn’t the only possible route, but employers often use it as a screening shortcut, so replacing that signal takes substantial evidence.
Networking with people at health-tech companies, contributing to relevant open-source projects, and getting feedback from working engineers may help more than collecting generic certifications. Consider adjacent roles too, such as clinical informatics, implementation engineering, solutions engineering, data engineering, or developer-facing healthcare operations. Those could let you use your clinical expertise while building professional technical experience and moving toward software development over time.
A $120,000 starting salary would be unusually ambitious for someone entering software engineering with no professional development experience. In the current U.S. market, something closer to $80,000–$90,000 may be more realistic for a junior role, depending heavily on location and the company. Larger tech companies can pay more, but they usually expect strong technical ability and demanding interview performance even from candidates with degrees.
The market for junior developers is particularly competitive right now, so this could be a difficult transition. Your clinical background may give you an advantage with health-tech companies, especially if you can demonstrate that you understand real clinical problems and can build useful solutions around them.
Before committing, look closely at actual job postings for the health-tech roles you want. Some positions may value clinical experience, while others have strict requirements for a computer science or engineering degree. Requirements can also vary dramatically between application development, healthcare analytics, research software, and highly specialized technical roles.
A portfolio should focus on a few polished, technically substantial projects rather than many small tutorials. For example, you could build a secure-looking clinical workflow prototype, a medication-interaction tool using reliable public data, or a healthcare data pipeline. Be clear about the architecture, testing, security considerations, tradeoffs, and limitations. Your PA experience becomes much more valuable when it helps you identify and explain a genuine user problem.
I’d also check whether the roles you’re targeting require specialized graduate training. Some healthcare technology positions are much more research-oriented than general product engineering and may have unusually strict education requirements.