Staff Data Engineer

Staff Data Engineer

Reporting to the Director of Data Engineering, you will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for shaping, scaling, and governing Interwell Health’s modern data ecosystem. The role combines architecture, hands-on engineering, platform leadership, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver governed, high-quality, analytics-ready data for clinical and business needs.

Responsibilities

Architecture & Strategy

• Design and evolve a scalable, secure, cloud-native lakehouse platform using Databricks, Microsoft Fabric (OneLake/Lakehouse/Data Factory), and dbt.
• Define data modeling patterns, governance frameworks, and engineering best practices across the data lifecycle.
• Lead design reviews and guide teams in adopting scalable architectural patterns.
• Drive long-term platform strategy and evaluate emerging technologies.

Hands-on Engineering

• Build batch and streaming data pipelines for healthcare sources (EHR, claims, HL7/FHIR, APIs, flat files, databases).
• Create modular frameworks for ingestion, data quality, lineage, metadata, and observability.
• Produce analytics-ready datasets and data models for BI, analytics, and machine learning.
• Implement HIPAA-aligned access patterns and secure handling of PHI.
• Architect Databricks workloads (clusters/jobs/Unity Catalog/Delta Lake) for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Integrate Databricks and Microsoft Fabric with Azure services and enterprise systems.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Partner with product managers, data scientists, analysts, clinicians, and business stakeholders to translate data needs into scalable solutions.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to modernize and unify the data ecosystem.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; improve team capability via coaching and standards.
• Drive roadmap planning, platform evolution, and long-term data strategy.
• Champion engineering excellence, reliability practices, documentation quality, and governance.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field.
• 7+ years of data engineering experience.
• 2+ years in a senior/staff-level engineering role.
• Strong hands-on proficiency with Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, dbt, and Python.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale cloud data platforms (Azure preferred).
• Lakehouse/Unity/OneLake/ Data Factory experience.
• Advanced lakehouse platform architecture and ability to design modular, extensible enterprise data frameworks.
• Strong command of distributed processing and cloud-native engineering.
• Experience in HIPAA-regulated environments and handling PHI.
• Healthcare data fluency and compliance-minded data practices.
• Technical leadership, mentorship, and strong communication with technical and clinical stakeholders.

Nice-to-haves (implicit from stack and responsibilities)

• Experience with CI/CD for data pipelines and platform reliability practices.