Lead Data Engineer

IQVIA; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental and vision coverage

Telemedicine

Flexible work environment

Parental leave for birth or adoption

Training systems

Tuition reimbursement

Employee resource groups

Commuter benefits

Job summary

IQVIA is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to drive the technical direction of data pipelines and data warehouse layers. You will lead cross-team collaboration, mentor engineers, and deliver robust data platforms using Prefect, Python, and SQL.

You will influence platform evolution, ensure reliability, and work with Product, Engineering, QA, and ML leads in a dynamic, cross-functional environment across Europe, ideally commutable to Amsterdam.

Qualifications

• Experience leading data engineering teams and driving architectural decisions.
• Hands-on data engineering with Python, SQL and data pipelines.
• Strong communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with healthcare or life sciences data is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end design and delivery of the data platform (pipelines + warehouse).
• Standardize patterns, reduce operational overhead, and improve reliability.
• Mentor data engineering colleagues and manage work intake.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, QA, and ML leads.

Skills

Leadership

Architecture decisions

DevOps / CI-CD

SQL

Python

Data modeling

Data lineage

Team management

English comms

Healthcare data

Mentoring

RDBMS

Prefect/Airflow

Tools

Prefect

Airflow

Dagster

SQL

Python

CI/CD

Microsoft SQL

PostgreSQL

Job description

• We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to drive technical direction of data pipeline and data warehouse layers bringing product robustness and maturity. You are comfortable leading work across evolving platforms and stakeholders: aligning on target patterns, ensuring continuity for users and downstream consumers, and delivering incremental improvements while keeping reliability and quality high
• You can make decisions when multiple potential approaches are identified taking into account existing codebase, reduction of operational overhead, team strengths and business priorities
• You will have the ability to mentor and coach data engineering colleagues to support their weekly responsibilities, ongoing professional development, job satisfaction and career potential
• You are a hands-on, self-directed individual who can bring experience in data engineering to identify incremental or substantial areas of improvement, leading on implementation with best practices
• You are a professional who is passionate about improving healthcare and having a real impact having developed yourself as a data engineer with a software engineering background. You have an appetite to learn and develop yourself, an innate curiosity, and can bring to light clarity around abstract and unclear problems. You feel comfortable working in a self-organizing company
• Lead end-to-end design and delivery of the data platform (pipelines + warehouse layers), primarily using Prefect, Python and SQL, supported by fit-for-purpose design artefacts and lineage
• Drive platform evolution by standardising patterns, reduction of operational overhead, and improving maintainability and reliability across the data landscape
• Ensure continuity and quality during change via release planning, validation strategies, risk management, and clear technical stakeholder communication
• Partner with Product and Engineering to refine requirements, shape delivery plans, and prioritise backlog/work intake based on value, dependencies, and technical constraints
• Raise engineering standards through reviews, quality practices, and responsible AI-assisted engineering (e.g., accelerating development and strengthening tests/refactoring under clear controls)
• Collaborate with QA to increase test maturity, coverage, and automation for pipelines and data transformations
• Collaborate with Application and AI/ML leads to integrate data components with the wider product ecosystem (e.g., search and ML pipelines)
• Lead the data engineering team (line management where applicable), coaching engineers and owning work intake and prioritisation
• You will be a part of innovation in the medical field, contributing to improved outcomes for healthcare patients and providers
• You will have the opportunity to be responsible for technical communication and preparation in cross-team projects. This will often mean online collaboration with international colleagues
• You will collaborate with Machine Learning specialists gaining exposure to ML and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Medical data is an interesting problem space, both in complexity and in societal value. The texts are a domain of its own with extremely high information density. It gives a real kick when users let us know they were able to collect data they were unable to use previously, such as finding people with a rare disease that might take years otherwise to diagnose or rapidly building quality datasets for COVID research
• You will be part of a larger, cross-functional and dynamic team consisting of developers, designers, medical consultants and ML engineers

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision coverage
• Telemedicine
• Critical illness coverage
• Prescription coverage
• Disability, accidental death, pet and life insurance
• Employee Assistance Programs
• Mental health support
• Well-being programs and events
• Flexible work environment
• Time off for leisure, personal time and corporate holidays
• Parental leave for birth or adoption
• Paid leave for other life matters (i.e., illness, bereavement, jury duty, military service, etc.)
• Training systems
• AI talent marketplace tool
• Leadership training programs
• Employee recognition programs
• Mentorship programs
• Service awards
• Tuition reimbursement
• Paid volunteer day
• Donation matching
• Employee resource groups
• Office events
• Environmental commitments
• UN Global Impact member
• Retirement and savings plans
• Identity theft protection
• Commuter benefits

• History of successfully developing data pipelines (e.g. Prefect, Airflow, Luigi, Dagster)
• Ability to autonomously make architecture and design decisions as lead
• Experience with DevOps workflows, especially CI/CD
• Attention to detail
• You are based in Europe, ideally commutable to Amsterdam, Netherlands
• You are able to clearly explain and translate conceptual ideas and technical rationale to technical and non-technical colleagues
• Hands on experience with RDBMS (Microsoft SQL or PostgreSQL preferred) and comfortable writing SQL, both DDL and DML
• Demonstrated use of automation and AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering outcomes (quality, speed, test coverage, maintainability) in a controlled and secure way
• Extensive experience with Python in a testable and scalable fashion
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills
• Experience as lead or managing developer, or substantial experience at senior level
• Good interpersonal communication and presentation skills
• You have worked as part of teams consisting of 4 or more developers and are used to having your ideas challenged and providing constructive criticism to others
• Exposure to healthcare / life sciences / clinical trials / pharmaceutical data
• Master Data Management of ideally medical ontologies
• Knowledge of medical data standards such as FHIR based data exchange and/or OMOP
• Dutch language skills are a plus for local collaboration and accessing local data sources
• Data lineage