Staff Data Platform Engineer

About the role

We are looking for an experienced Staff Data Platform Engineer to lead the design and long-term direction of a foundational data platform in San Francisco, California. In this role, you will shape how critical operational data is modeled, governed, and accessed to support automation in a highly regulated healthcare environment. You will combine architectural leadership with hands-on engineering to build reliable, scalable systems that enable product teams to move quickly while maintaining accuracy, performance, and audit readiness.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and ongoing refinement of core data structures, including business entities, system events, and traceable records for automated outcomes.
• Develop and maintain the platform services and storage layers that support AI-enabled workflows, ensuring data is both usable for decision-making and controlled for compliance needs.
• Create approaches for organizing, versioning, and retrieving domain knowledge so the platform can expand in capability as product needs evolve.
• Define stable data interfaces and platform APIs that allow engineering teams to build new functionality against dependable contracts.
• Improve scalability and system resilience to support rapid growth in users, workload volume, and transaction complexity.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders to set technical priorities, evaluate tradeoffs, and guide platform strategy.
• Write production-quality backend code and contribute directly to implementation across the data platform stack.
• Strengthen observability, testing, and data quality practices to protect integrity and support effective incident response.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with experience designing data platforms or foundational data layers for complex, evolving software systems.
• Experience building platforms from the ground up (0-1) or modernizing existing platforms.
• Strong expertise in Python and building production-grade services in cloud-based environments.
• Deep knowledge of relational database design, including schema architecture, performance tuning, and data modeling decisions.
• Hands-on background with AWS and infrastructure tooling such as Terraform.
• Proven ability to operate and improve large-scale production systems with a focus on reliability and performance.
• Experience with platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric.
• Ability to make sound technical decisions in fast-changing environments with incomplete or evolving requirements.