Lead Data Engineer

IQVIA; Ede; Hybrid; EUR 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

IQVIA is seeking a Lead Data Engineer for the Patient Finder product in Europe. You will steer the data pipeline and warehouse strategy, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product and AI/ML leads to integrate data components with the wider product ecosystem.

This role emphasizes reliability, scalability, and data quality. You will guide architecture decisions, improve tests and observability, and drive technical direction across evolving platforms while aligning with business priorities.

Qualifications

• Extensive Python development experience with scalable solutions.
• Proven ETL/ELT design and data pipeline implementation.
• Advanced SQL skills with enterprise RDBMS.
• Experience building cloud-based data platforms and warehouses.
• Strong leadership and mentorship capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end data platform design and delivery (pipelines + warehouse).
• Standardise patterns and improve maintainability and reliability.
• Plan releases with risk management and stakeholder communication.
• Collaborate with Product/Engineering to refine requirements and priorities.
• Mentor data engineers and lead the team.

Skills

Python development

ETL/ELT design

SQL proficiency

Data pipeline architecture

Mentorship / leadership

Agile teamwork

Communication with stakeholders

Tools

Airflow

Prefect

Luigi

Dagster

dbt

Databricks

Job description

About IQVIA Patient Finder

We live in a world where most information is readily available at our fingertips. You might be surprised to learn the situation in hospitals is rather different. Systems used for electronic healthcare records (EHR) facilitate the clinical workflow, retrieving and storing information for each patient. There is, however, a large need for secondary usage of this data. Think of linking patients to clinical trials, medical research studies, and care quality assessment. For this purpose IQVIA has developed a search engine enabling medical professionals to find patient cohorts and collect data. In all that we do, we have the doctors and patients at the fore of our mind, and we also ensure to strictly adhere to privacy regulations.

About IQVIA Patient Finder

Patient Finder is currently used on a daily basis by 40+ hospitals in The Netherlands and Belgium and is expanding into other international markets. The product is a scale-up within a larger corporation, meaning the product is proven while there is still room to make your own mark and propose creative solutions.

The role and your profile

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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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, reducing 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.

Requirements

• Extensive hands-on experience in Python development, with a strong focus on building scalable, maintainable, testable, and production-grade solutions.
• Proven experience designing, developing, and maintaining ETL/ELT data pipelines using modern orchestration frameworks such as Airflow, Prefect, Luigi, or Dagster.
• Experience in dbt (Data Build Tool) for data transformation, data modelling, testing, documentation, and deployment within modern analytics ecosystems.
• Experience working with Databricks, including data engineering workflows, and optimization of large-scale data pipelines.
• Advanced SQL skills with hands-on experience in Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or other enterprise RDBMS platforms, including both DDL and DML operations.
• Demonstrated experience building and managing cloud-based data platforms, data warehouses, and Lakehouse architectures.
• Experience leading development teams or serving as a senior technical contributor, providing architectural guidance and technical mentorship.
• Ability to make independent architecture and design decisions while balancing scalability, maintainability, performance, and business requirements.
• Strong understanding of data engineering best practices, including data quality, lineage, observability, governance, and performance optimization.
• Proven track record of leveraging automation and AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, code quality, test coverage, and maintainability in a secure and controlled manner.
• Experience with DevOps practices, including version control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code principles.
• Excellent ability to communicate complex technical concepts and business value propositions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong collaboration skills with experience working in agile teams of four or more developers, providing constructive feedback and embracing technical discussions.
• Excellent interpersonal, presentation, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills.
• High attention to detail and commitment to delivering high-quality solutions.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Based in Europe, preferably within commuting distance of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of medical data standards such as FHIR based data exchange and/or OMOP
• Exposure to healthcare / life sciences / clinical trials / pharmaceutical data
• Master Data Management of ideally medical ontologies
• Data lineage
• Dutch language skills are a plus for local collaboration and accessing local data sources

Opportunities

• 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.

About Us

• Our Data team currently consists of 1 product owner, 5 developers.
• The Patient Finder team consists of approximately 30 people organised across three development squads (App, Data, AI/ML), Deployment, Support and Consultancy.
• Patient Finder team is part of a larger healthcare product portfolio across the EMEA region within the IQVIA business.
• Our team largely works from home but employees are free to choose between office, home, or hybrid work locations. Data team typically attend the office weekly.

IQVIA is a leading global provider of clinical research services, commercial insights and healthcare intelligence to the life sciences and healthcare industries. We create intelligent connections to accelerate the development and commercialization of innovative medical treatments to help improve patient outcomes and population health worldwide. Learn more at https://jobs.iqvia.com

IQVIA is committed to integrity in our hiring process and maintains a zero tolerance policy for candidate fraud. All information and credentials submitted in your application must be truthful and complete. Any false statements, misrepresentations, or material omissions during the recruitment process will result in immediate disqualification of your application, or termination of employment if discovered later, in accordance with applicable law. We appreciate your honesty and professionalism.