Lead Data Product Owner - RWD

Norstella; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Norstella is seeking a Lead Data Product Owner for Real-World Data (RWD) to serve as a healthcare data SME, defining best practices and partnering with engineering, product, delivery, and client teams to ensure data meets client needs.

In this senior IC role, you will own data curation, establish quality checks, and help drive data-driven decisions across projects, with a focus on claims, EMR/EHR, and lab data.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data quality, analytics, or data engineering within healthcare or life sciences.

Responsibilities

• Own data curation and define data element specifications across data products.

Skills

Data quality

Analytics

Data engineering

SQL

Leadership

Documentation

Tools

Python

R

Airflow

Amazon Redshift

DBT

SQL

Job description

Job Description – Lead Data Product Owner, RWD

About Norstella

Norstella is a premier and critical global life sciences data and AI solutions platform dedicated to improving patient access to life-saving therapies. Norstella supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies across the full drug development lifecycle — from pipeline to patient. Our mission is simple: to help our clients bring therapies to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately impacting patient lives.

• Accelerate the drug development cycle
• Make data driven commercial and financial decisions
• Match and recruit patients for clinical trials
• Assess competition and bring the right drugs to market
• Identify and address barriers to patient access
• Leverage the latest AI to turn data into insights for faster and better decision making

Norstella serves almost every pharmaceutical and biotech company in the world, along with regulators like the FDA, and payers. By providing critical proprietary data supporting AI-driven workflows, Norstella helps clients make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Norstella’s investments in AI are transforming how data is consumed and decisions are made, disrupting inefficient legacy workflows and helping the industry become more efficient, innovative, and responsive to patient needs.

About The Position

We are seeking a Lead Data Product Owner to join Norstella's Real-World Data (RWD) organization. This senior individual contributor role serves as a healthcare data subject-matter expert, defines best practices for data use, and partners closely with engineering, product, delivery, and client-facing teams to ensure the data meets client needs.

Key Responsibilities

Data Curation and Ownership

• Define data element specifications, including data types, standard vocabularies, and curation logic across data products.
• Evaluate curated outputs against published literature and other relevant evidence sources.
• Build and maintain deep knowledge of Norstella databases, including curation methods, ETL processes, and product offerings.
• Design data quality checks across ingestion and harmonization to strengthen reliability and downstream usability.
• Document methodological decisions for internal and external audiences, including release notes and supporting documentation.
• Identify recurring data issues and recommend process improvements.

Cross-Functional & Vendor Support

• Plan and execute data changes and enhancements across engineering and client delivery teams.
• Drive cross-functional alignment by fostering collaboration, transparency, and clarity around shared goals and execution plans.
• Respond to data questions and concerns from internal and external stakeholders to inform product refinement.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data quality, analytics, or data engineering roles, ideally within healthcare or life sciences.
• Hands-on experience working with large, complex healthcare datasets.
• Deep understanding of real-world data sources, including claims, EMR/EHR, and lab data.
• Proficient SQL skills and experience navigating data pipelines and warehouses.
• Proven ability to independently lead work from initial assessment through execution and resolution.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and documentation skills, with a high standard for accuracy and clarity.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience designing and curating data models.
• Knowledge of healthcare data standards, privacy, and compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA).
• Experience with Python, R, Airflow, Amazon Redshift, DBM, or comparable cloud data warehouse environments.

Our Guiding Principles For Success At Norstella

• Bold, Passionate, Mission-First We have a lofty mission to Smooth Access to Life Saving Therapies, and we will get there by being bold and passionate about the mission and our clients. Our clients and the mission in what we are trying to accomplish must be in the forefront of our minds in everything we do.
• Integrity, Truth, Reality We make promises that we can keep, and goals that push us to new heights. Our integrity offers us the opportunity to learn and improve by being honest about what works and what doesn’t. By being true to the data and producing realistic metrics, we are able to create plans and resources to achieve our goals.
• Kindness, Empathy, Grace We will empathize with everyone’s situation, provide positive and constructive feedback with kindness, and accept opportunities for improvement with grace and gratitude. We use this principle across the organization to collaborate and build lines of open communication.
• Resilience, Mettle, Perseverance We will persevere - even in difficult and challenging situations. Our ability to recover from missteps and failures in a positive way will help us to be successful in our mission.
• Humility, Gratitude, Learning We will be true learners by showing humility and gratitude in our work. We recognize that the smartest person in the room is the one who is always listening, learning, and willing to shift their thinking.

Norstella is an equal opportunities employer and does not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, color, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age. Our ethos is to respect and value people’s differences, to help everyone achieve more at work as well as in their personal lives so that they feel proud of the part they play in our success. We believe that all decisions about people at work should be based on the individual’s abilities, skills, performance and behavior and our business requirements. Norstella operates a zero-tolerance policy to any form of discrimination, abuse or harassment.