Senior Staff Engineer, Data Platform

Qualified Health; United States; Hybrid; USD 215,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical Insurance

Dental & Vision

Flexible hours

Hybrid work options

Inclusive culture

Job summary

Qualified Health in the United States is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for the Data Platform and to build it hands-on. Databricks lakehouse architecture, governance, and AI pipelines will be your core focus as you partner with product, AI, and engineering teams.

You will design durable workflows on Temporal, raise engineering effectiveness, and mentor engineers while delivering scalable data solutions for healthcare with safety and compliance in mind.

Qualifications

• Must have hands-on software/data engineering experience with production data platforms at scale.
• Strong Python and SQL skills with production-grade software practices (testing, CI/CD).
• Experience in regulated healthcare/insurance domains is required.
• Ability to own ambiguous cross-team problems end-to-end and influence without authority.
• Experience designing lakehouse architectures (Databricks) and governance models.

Responsibilities

• Own the lakehouse architecture and evolve Databricks pipelines and governance.
• Build and tune Spark/SQL pipelines, with data quality and cost controls.
• Define data contracts, security/PHI governance, and data reliability.
• Lead AI pipelines and Temporal-based workflows for durable orchestration.
• Mentor engineers across teams and align roadmaps with leadership.

Skills

Databricks expertise

Python

SQL

Cross‑team leadership

Agentic tooling usage

Design docs and architecture

Verbal and written communication

Healthcare/regulated domain experience

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

Microsoft Fabric

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

Airflow

Dagster

Terraform

Kubernetes

Temporal

Job description

Transform healthcare with us. At Qualified Health, we're redefining what's possible with Generative AI in healthcare. Our infrastructure provides the guardrails for safe AI governance, healthcare-specific agent creation, and real-time algorithm monitoring, working alongside leading health systems to drive real change. This is more than just a job. It's an opportunity to build the future of AI in healthcare, solve complex challenges, and make a lasting impact on patient care. If you're ambitious, innovative, and ready to move fast, we'd love to have you on board.

JOB SUMMARY

We are hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for the Data Platform and to build it hands‑on. Databricks is the center of the role: you will own the architecture of our lakehouse and the data pipelines, governance, and performance that run on it. In addition, you will build and run the AI pipelines that sit alongside it, using Temporal for durable orchestration. You will work across product, AI, and engineering pods, and you will raise the bar for how the whole team builds, including how we use AI coding agents to ship faster and with higher quality. You set platform‑wide strategy and architecture across multiple teams. You anticipate problems a year or more out, shape the roadmap with leadership, and measurably raise engineering effectiveness across the organization, while staying close enough to the code to build the hardest parts yourself.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the lakehouse. Architect and evolve our Databricks lakehouse, including medallion layering (bronze, silver, gold), Delta Lake, Unity Catalog governance, and workspace and compute strategy.
• Build and tune Databricks pipelines. Design, build, and optimize Spark and SQL pipelines on Databricks, including incremental processing, data quality enforcement, performance tuning, and cost management.
• Make data trustworthy. Define data contracts, quality checks, access controls, and PHI‑aware governance in partnership with security and compliance.
• Power AI and LLM workloads. Build the data foundations for AI products: LLM‑ready datasets, retrieval and vector‑store pipelines, evaluation data, and the interfaces that let AI and product teams consume governed data safely.
• Build AI pipelines on Temporal. In addition to Databricks, design durable workflows on Temporal for AI pipelines: scheduled and watermarked pulls from Databricks gold tables, file‑ingestion workflows, and long‑running LLM extraction and enrichment jobs. Establish patterns for retries, idempotency, versioning, and backfills, and keep the handoff between Databricks and Temporal clean, observable, and well governed.
• Lead agentic engineering. Use AI coding agents daily and define how the team does agentic development: tooling, prompts, guardrails, code review practices, and test strategy for agent‑written code.
• Set technical direction. Write and review technical designs, set platform‑wide standards, and make build‑versus‑buy decisions that hold up over multiple years.
• Multiply the team. Mentor engineers across teams, unblock other pods, and communicate trade‑offs clearly to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics or a related field
• At least 12+ years of software or data engineering experience, with a track record of designing and operating production data platforms at scale and of setting architecture across multiple teams.
• Experience working in a highly regulated domain (Healthcare, Insurance, Finance) is required
• Deep, hands‑on expertise with Databricks is highly preferred but expertise in Snowflake or Microsoft Fabric would be aligned as well.
• Experience with the lakehouse stack: Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows or equivalent, and performance and cost tuning at scale.
• Experience building pipelines for ML or LLM applications, such as LLM‑based extraction, embeddings and vector search, feature pipelines, or evaluation datasets.
• Fluency in Python and SQL, with sound software engineering practices: testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and code review.
• Demonstrated practical use of agentic coding tools (such as Claude Code or similar) in real delivery work, and good judgment about when to trust, verify, and constrain them.
• Experience owning ambiguous, cross‑team problems end to end and influencing without direct authority.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including authoring design docs that others build from.

DESIRABLE QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with healthcare data: claims, EHR, FHIR or HL7, and HIPAA‑compliant handling of PHI.
• Databricks certifications or experience with Delta Live Tables, Lakeflow, or Databricks Asset Bundles.
• Experience with other orchestrators (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and a view on when each is the right tool.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure), Terraform, and Kubernetes.
• Contributions to open‑source data, workflow, or AI infrastructure projects.

WHY JOIN QUALIFIED HEALTH?

This is an opportunity to join a fast‑growing company and a world‑class team that is poised to change the healthcare industry. We are a passionate, mission‑driven team building a category‑defining product. We are backed by premier investors and are looking for founding team members who are excited to do the best work of their careers. Our employees are integral to achieving our goals, so we are proud to offer competitive salaries with equity packages, robust medical/dental/vision insurance, flexible working hours, hybrid work options, and an inclusive environment that fosters creativity and innovation.

OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY

Qualified Health is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace is essential to our success, and we are committed to building a team that reflects the world we live in. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital status, disability, or veteran status.

PAY & BENEFITS

The pay range for this role is between $215,000 - $235,000, and will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location. This role is also eligible for equity and benefits. Join our mission to revolutionize healthcare with AI.