Staff Data Platform Engineer

About the role

Join Zocdoc as a Staff Data Platform Engineer, where you'll lead the evolution of our data platform at the intersection of data engineering and product engineering. This role focuses on platform experience and data product design, shaping how data moves within our ecosystems and ensuring its reliability and compliance. You'll work cross-functionally, influence standards, and mentor engineers while driving the adoption of AI-assisted development practices. Key missions: Defining and leading the evolution of Zocdoc’s data platform, focusing on platform experience and data product design.. Shaping the contracts, access patterns, APIs, governance controls, and interoperability standards that enable teams to reliably produce and consume data at scale.. Establishing best practices for schema registry usage and distributed schema validation across streaming and batch systems, and designing clear patterns for data access. Profile: - Experienced in building a data product used broadly across both technical and non-technical stakeholders - Passionate about designing data contracts and producer/consumer interfaces, not just pipelines - Thoughtful about the guardrails, access controls, and governance required when enabling GenAI systems to interact with sensitive data - Motivated to define clear access patterns across warehouse, lakehouse, and downstream systems - Excited about leveraging AI-assisted and agentic workflows to multiply engineering productivity - Energized by solving governance, schema evolution, and compliance challenges at scale - Comfortable setting long-term architectural direction while still diving into implementation details - Excited to build APIs, SDKs, and shared packages that product engineers adopt - Experience working with AI-assisted development tools or cloud-based coding environments (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, internal code generation frameworks, or similar systems) - Demonstrated experience designing data contracts, schema governance, or producer/consumer standards at scale - Experience with data warehouses such as Snowflake and strong understanding of performance and access patterns - Clear communication skills and a track record of influencing standards across an organization - Proven ability to lead cross-functional architectural initiatives across product, analytics, and infrastructure teams - 8+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or backend platform development - Strong expertise in Python and SQL, with hands-on experience building scalable data frameworks - Experience building APIs, shared libraries, or platform services adopted by multiple teams - Experience with distributed data systems such as Spark (Databricks or EMR) and modern lakehouse architectures (Delta Lake / Iceberg) - Perspective on how structured data models and contracts improve AI reliability and downstream automation - Familiarity with schema registry systems and schema evolution in streaming systems (e.g., Kafka) - Strong understanding of access control, RBAC, and compliance constraints in regulated environments - Strong understanding of governance considerations for GenAI systems, including access control, prompt safety, sensitive data handling, and auditability - Experience integrating streaming systems (Kafka/Kinesis) with warehouse and lakehouse ecosystems - Experience working in regulated environments involving PHI/PII - Experience building internal developer platforms for event logging or data publishing - Familiarity with metadata and governance platforms (e.g., Unity Catalog, Collibra, OpenMetadata) - Experience designing reverse ETL frameworks or operational activation pipelines