Principal Engineer, Data

Ensemble Health Partners; Kentucky; Hybrid; USD 149,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Ensemble Health Partners seeks a Principal Data Engineer to serve as the senior technical authority on data architecture. You will design a cloud-native data platform on Azure and Databricks, guiding AI-driven capabilities and scalable data products across the organization.

You will own the data engineering technology roadmap, evaluate emerging tools, and act as an architectural escalation point for performance, cost, and reliability across the data platform.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant job experience.
• Deep experience designing and reviewing SQL-based data models and transformations at enterprise scale.
• Experience with Databricks and Azure data platforms.
• Strong communication to technical and executive stakeholders.
• Ability to translate business needs into scalable data solutions.

Responsibilities

• Architect scalable, secure, and cost-efficient data solutions across teams.
• Define and evolve data engineering standards and guardrails.
• Lead AI-ready data standards and observability for data platforms.
• Develop a technology roadmap aligned to business priorities.
• Mentor senior engineers and influence with credibility rather than authority.

Skills

10+ years experience

SQL data models

Databricks

Azure

Data platforms

Communication

Mentorship

Tools

Databricks

Azure

Job description

Thank you for considering a career at Ensemble! Ensemble is a leading provider of technology-enabled revenue cycle management solutions for health systems, including hospitals and affiliated physician groups. They offer end-to-end revenue cycle solutions as well as a comprehensive suite of point solutions to clients across the country. Ensemble keeps communities healthy by keeping hospitals healthy. We recognize that healthcare requires a human touch, and we believe that every touch should be meaningful. This is why our people are the most important part of who we are. By empowering them to challenge the status quo, we know they will be the difference!

O.N.E Purpose

Customer Obsession: Consistently provide exceptional experiences for our clients, patients, and colleagues by understanding their needs and exceeding their expectations. Embracing New Ideas: Continuously innovate by embracing emerging technology and fostering a culture of creativity and experimentation. Striving for Excellence: Execute at a high level by demonstrating our "Best in KLAS" Ensemble Difference Principles and consistently delivering outstanding results.

The Opportunity

As Principal Data Engineer, you will serve as Ensemble’s senior technical authority on data architecture — a high-level individual contributor, not a people manager. You will assess data engineering practices across the organization, architect solutions that scale across teams, and establish a strong foundation for AI-driven capabilities across the organization. You will architect and design a cloud-native data platform built on Azure and Databricks, enabling trusted, governed, and reusable data products that accelerate insight generation, operational automation, and emerging AI use cases.

You will also own the organization’s data engineering technology roadmap, staying ahead of emerging tools and techniques and recommending what we should evaluate or adopt next. This role serves as a technical escalation point and architectural authority for the Data Platform, influencing performance, scalability, cost optimization, developer experience, and long-term sustainability of Ensemble’s data ecosystem through credibility and technical judgment rather than formal authority.

Job Competencies

• Technical Decision Making - Makes sound architectural and technical decisions by gathering and weighing information from multiple sources, evaluating trade-offs against reliability, cost, and scalability; clearly communicates decisions and rationale to technical and non-technical stakeholders; drives results through the strength of the recommendation, not positional authority.
• Technical Mentorship - Elevates the capability of senior and staff engineers by sharing architectural thinking, providing design-review feedback, and modeling sound engineering judgment; develops others through example and coaching rather than formal supervision, without holding management responsibility for their performance or career progression.
• Influencing Without Authority - Drives adoption of architectural standards and technical direction across teams through credibility, clear reasoning, and relationship-building rather than reporting lines; earns buy-in from engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders who do not report to this role.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration - Builds productive working relationships across data engineering, analytics, data science, product, and platform teams to align architectural decisions with business goals, without formal authority over those teams.
• Technical & Executive Communication - Clearly and succinctly conveys complex architectural and technical concepts to both engineering peers and executive stakeholders; communicates in a focused and compelling way that captures and holds others’ attention (appropriate, impactful, and clear).
• Technical Program Ownership - Demonstrates high accountability for architectural initiatives and proofs of concept from inception through adoption; considers cost and resourcing impact to ensure maximized output, reduced waste, and exceptional results.
• Innovation & Continuous Learning - Stays ahead of the industry by continuously evaluating emerging tools, frameworks, and techniques for genuine fit within the organization; runs proofs of concept to validate new approaches before recommending broader adoption, rather than chasing trends for their own sake.

Job Functions

Technical Assessment & Architecture

Conduct cross-organizational assessments of existing data pipelines, platforms, and engineering practices to identify inefficiencies, technical debt, risk, and opportunities for improvement. Architect scalable, secure, and cost-efficient data solutions that span multiple teams and business domains, built on Databricks and Azure. Act as a technical escalation point for the organization’s hardest data engineering problems, diagnosing recurring or systemic reliability issues in tier-1 pipelines and datasets. Define and evolve data engineering standards, patterns, and architectural guardrails used across engineering teams, balancing standardization with the flexibility teams need to move quickly.

AI & Advanced Analytics Enablement

Establish and evolve a data platform architecture that enables AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics workloads, including feature readiness, training data quality, lineage, and observability. Partner with Data Science, Analytics, Product, and Cloud teams to ensure data platforms support model development, deployment, and monitoring without creating operational or governance risk. Define and enforce AI-ready data standards, including data quality thresholds, metadata completeness, schema stability, and data timeliness required to support advanced analytics and AI workloads.

Technology Roadmap & Innovation

Stay ahead of the industry by continuously evaluating emerging tools, frameworks, and techniques in the data and AI space for genuine fit within Ensemble’s environment, rather than chasing trends for their own sake. Run proofs of concept and technical spikes to validate new approaches before recommending broader adoption. Author and maintain a data engineering technology roadmap aligned to business priorities, with clear reasoning on trade-offs, cost, and adoption sequencing. Present roadmap recommendations and their business impact to both technical and executive stakeholders, translating deep technical trade-offs into clear strategic choices.

Platform Standards, Governance & Cost Optimization

Treat enterprise datasets as data products, with clear ownership, quality guarantees, documentation, and usage metrics. Establish platform standards and architectural guardrails to optimize compute efficiency, storage utilization, query performance, and pipeline reliability. Partner with Finance, Cloud, and Engineering leaders to implement cost transparency (FinOps) across Databricks and Azure, including budgets, usage monitoring, and proactive optimization. Drive platform decisions using clear metrics such as cost-to-serve, workload efficiency, platform SLAs, and utilization trends. Ensure platform-level observability, including workload performance, cost drivers, usage patterns, and capacity forecasting.

Cross-Functional Influence & Mentorship

Mentor senior and staff engineers on architecture and design thinking, elevating their capability without holding formal management responsibility for their performance. Influence technical direction across teams through credibility, clear communication, and sound technical judgment rather than formal authority. Partner with data engineering, analytics, data science, and platform/infrastructure teams to ensure architectural decisions stay aligned with business goals.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• 10+ years of relevant job experience
• Deep experience designing and reviewing SQL-based data models and transformations at enterprise scale.
• 3+ years working with big data technologies including but not limited to Databricks, SPARK, Azure, with a willingness and ability to learn new ones
• Excellent understanding of engineering fundamentals: testing automation, code reviews, telemetry, iterative delivery and DevOps
• Experience with polyglot storage architectures including relational, columnar, key-value, graph or equivalent
• Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively to both technical and non-technical, globally distributed audiences
• Solid foundations in formal architecture, design patterns and best practices
• Experience designing data platforms that support AI/ML, advanced analytics, or intelligent automation workloads.
• Deep experience with Azure cloud services and Databricks, including Spark-based data engineering patterns.
• Proven ability to translate business needs into scalable data solutions.
• Experience owning or operating large-scale cloud data platforms, including responsibility for cost optimization, performance tuning, and platform reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to scale data engineering through enablement, standards, and platforms, not just direct delivery.
• Strong understanding of Databricks pricing models, workload optimization, and Azure cloud cost drivers preferred.
• Demonstrated experience assessing data engineering practices across multiple teams or business units and translating findings into a concrete architectural or technology roadmap.
• Track record of evaluating emerging tools and technologies for real fit within an organization, and driving adoption decisions through credibility and clear communication rather than formal authority.

This document is not an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, skills, duties, requirements, or working conditions associated with the job. Associates may be required to perform other job related duties as required by their supervisor, subject to reasonable accommodation.

This position pays between $148,800 - $256,700 based on experience

Must be inquisitive and demonstrate openness to innovation including AI to explore better processes and ways to alleviate friction and improve patient and client experiences. This is a remote position; however, candidates must be willing and able to travel to and work onsite at client, temporary, or corporate office locations as business needs require.

#LI-SA1 #LI-REMOTE

Join an award-winning company

• Five-time winner of "Best in KLAS" 2020-2022, 2024-2025
• Black Book Research's Top Revenue Cycle Management Outsourcing Solution 2021-2024
• 22 Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) MAP Awards for High Performance in Revenue Cycle 2019-2024
• Leader in Everest Group's RCM Operations PEAK Matrix Assessment 2024
• Clarivate Healthcare Business Insights (HBI) Revenue Cycle Awards for strong performance 2020, 2022-2023
• Energage Top Workplaces USA 2022-2024
• Fortune Media Best Workplaces in Healthcare 2024
• Monster Top Workplace for Remote Work 2024
• Great Place to Work certified 2023-2024

Associate Benefits – We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial health of you and your family, including healthcare, time off, retirement, and well-being programs.

Our Culture – Ensemble is a place where associates can do their best work and be their best selves. We put people first, last and always.

Growth – We invest in your professional development. Each associate will earn a professional certification relevant to their field and can obtain tuition reimbursement.

Recognition – We offer quarterly and annual incentive programs for all employees who go beyond and keep raising the bar for themselves and the company.

Ensemble is an equal employment opportunity employer. It is our policy not to discriminate against any applicant or employee based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religion, national origin, age, disability, military or veteran status, genetic information or any other basis protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws. Ensemble also prohibits harassment of applicants or employees based on any of these protected categories.

Due to business, operational, payroll, and regulatory requirements, this position is limited to individuals who reside and are authorized to work within the United States. Applications generated from outside the United States will not be considered. Individuals may reapply when located within the United States.

Ensemble provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and applicable state and local law. If you require accommodation in the application process, please contact [e-mail].

This posting addresses state specific requirements to provide pay transparency. Compensation decisions consider many job-related factors, including but not limited to geographic location; knowledge; skills; relevant experience; education; licensure; internal equity; time in position. A candidate entry rate of pay does not typically fall at the minimum or maximum of the role's range.

Employment Disclaimers – Ensemble Legitimate Ensemble Recruiters will only contact you from an email address ending in "@ensemblehp.com." Don’t fall victim to fake job postings from fraudsters posing as Ensemble Human Resources personnel. Ensemble will never ask for a payment in exchange for a job opportunity or ask you to submit sensitive personal information via email, phone, form, app or text. Ensemble is dedicated to providing our clients with experienced healthcare finance and revenue cycle professionals. We believe that our core values of trust, integrity, loyalty and service married with the belief that our work is worthwhile helps us build and sustain sincere relationships with our associates and clients. If you are a passionate, dedicated and experienced revenue cycle, consulting or finance professional and seek career and personal growth, we would love to hear from you. We believe we foster an environment where talented individuals can excel and shine. Our team believes that people are the most important part of our success and that when we take care of our people, they pay it forward by providing our clients with excellent results and world-class service.