Director of Data Platform

enGen; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

A healthcare technology firm is looking for a strategic leader with extensive technical expertise in data engineering and distributed systems. The ideal candidate should possess profound knowledge of healthcare data, modern data platforms, and outstanding leadership capabilities. Key responsibilities include overseeing the long-term strategy for data platforms, leading the design of scalable data solutions, and ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations. Strong communication skills are critical for this role, as is effective collaboration with diverse teams across the organization.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to design and manage large-scale, secure, and cost-effective data platforms.
• Experience with building HIPAA-compliant platforms.
• Proficient in modern data platforms and processing tools.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the long-term data platform and engineering strategy.
• Lead the design, development, and operation of data pipelines.
• Ensure compliance with healthcare regulatory requirements.

Skills

Strategic leadership

Technical expertise in data engineering

Experience in healthcare data

Communication and influence skills

Knowledge of FHIR and HL7

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

GCP

AWS

Azure

Spark

Airflow

Presto/Trino

Iceberg

dbt

Job description

Overview

We are seeking a highly skilled and strategic leader with extensive technical expertise in data engineering, distributed systems, and cloud-native architecture, preferably within the healthcare domain. The ideal candidate will possess strong proficiency across modern data platforms, including cloud environments such as GCP (preferred), AWS, and Azure, alongside data processing tools like Spark, Flink, Kafka, and Airflow. Expertise in data storage and querying technologies (BigQuery, Presto/Trino, Iceberg, data lakes, and warehouses), coupled with analytics engineering using dbt and semantic modeling, is essential. A proven ability to design and manage large-scale, secure, and cost-effective data platforms is required. This role is pivotal in defining and owning the long-term data platform and engineering strategy, establishing technical roadmaps, and driving architectural decisions for data ingestion, storage, processing, interoperability, and analytics across the enterprise.

This position also demands significant healthcare industry knowledge, including strong experience with healthcare data, a deep understanding of standards like FHIR, HL7, and related APIs, hands-on experience managing PHI, and building HIPAA-compliant platforms. Familiarity with clinical, claims, and operational healthcare data and their analytical use cases is critical.

The ideal candidate will possess exceptional communication and influence skills, with the proven ability to bridge the gap between highly technical concepts and business stakeholders. They must be comfortable and effective in presenting complex technical information to both executive leadership and non-technical audiences, fostering clear understanding and alignment across the organization.

Finally, the successful candidate will possess strong leadership and strategic capabilities, evidenced by success in leading and scaling high-performing data platform engineering teams in complex enterprise environments. They will be responsible for defining technical vision, setting clear goals, driving execution, influencing cross-functional stakeholders, and fostering a culture of excellence, innovation, and collaboration. Key responsibilities include leading the design, development, and operation of scalable, reliable, and secure data pipelines (ETL/ELT) and platforms, ensuring high availability and performance, and guiding the adoption of modern data engineering practices such as Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, DataOps, and platform self-service. The incumbent will also establish and enforce data quality standards, metadata management, lineage, and operational excellence, ensuring compliance with healthcare regulatory requirements (HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2) and partnering with governance and security teams to protect sensitive data. Collaboration with data science, analytics, product, clinical, and IT teams is essential to deliver trusted and actionable data solutions and to act as a technical advisor to senior leadership, ensuring the availability, performance, and stability of data processes.