Staff Data Engineer

Cityblock Health; United States; On-site; USD 153,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life insurance

Retirement benefits

Equity program

Paid time off

Vacation and sick leave

Job summary

Cityblock Health is seeking an experienced engineer to own and scale our data pipeline and semantic layer. You will improve identity and eligibility data quality, build robust ingest/transform systems, and maintain the reverse-ETL feeding operational data for the care model.

You will work with BigQuery, dbt, and orchestration tools to enable trusted analytics and AI-assisted decision making across BI, clinical, and product teams.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience building trustworthy systems.
• Hands-on experience with dbt and SQL at production scale including orchestration with Dagster, Airflow, or equivalent.
• Experience owning operational or reverse-ETL data systems that other applications depend on in production.
• Experience designing or maintaining a semantic layer or a metrics layer.
• Understanding how LLMs consume structured context and fluent daily use of AI assistants tooling for engineering and data analytics.
• Demonstrated ability to scale AI adoption to accelerate collaborative work with peers.
• Able to partner with BI, clinical, and product stakeholders whose expertise differs from yours.

Responsibilities

• Improve the quality of member identity and eligibility data.
• Build and maintain the ingest and transformation systems for partner data.
• Own the reverse-ETL layer feeding operational data for the care model.
• Support clinical performance evaluation via a quality metrics pipeline (HEDIS/Stars).

Skills

dbt

SQL

Dagster

Airflow

Data pipelines

BigQuery

Semantic layer

LLM context

Education

CS degree or equivalent

Tools

Dagster

Airflow

BigQuery

Job description

About the role

Cityblock delivers value-based care to individuals with complex needs with a particular focus on Medicaid beneficiaries and those who are dually eligible, people the healthcare system has historically underserved. Increasingly, whether a care or operational decision drives a positive outcome depends on whether a human or an AI agent can reason correctly over our data.

This role owns major parts of the foundation that makes that possible. You'll take ownership across our data pipeline that will be leveraged at scale to enable people and models to arrive at the same answers that drive the care our members receive.

You will work in a dbt Mesh on BigQuery (GCP), with ingestion orchestrated through Dagster. The data you handle spans claims (medical and pharmacy), eligibility and enrollment rosters, EHR data, and HIE/FHIR feeds. You’ll work with data from our internally developed care management platform, vendor systems, and pull that data through to our semantic layer.

You will treat data quality as the product.

Job Description

The following responsibilities and responsibilities outline your main duties.

• You’ll improve the quality of member identity and eligibility data that determines who is an active member and gates every downstream clinical and financial workflow.
• Build and maintain the ingest and transformation systems that turn raw partner data into something dependable, from correctness through freshness to reliability.
• Own the reverse-ETL layer that feeds the operational data that directly impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of the execution of Cityblock's care model.
• Support clinical performance evaluation and value-based contracts through a quality measurement pipeline that produces HEDIS and Stars metrics.

Across semantic and metrics layer

• Define and maintain the semantic and metrics layer so each metric has one correct definition, applied consistently across every dashboard and every consumer.
• Make metrics machine-readable and well-constrained, so an AI agent querying them gets a correct answer because the layer bounds what it can conclude.
• Build self-serve analytics so stakeholders can answer their own questions against definitions they can trust.

Across teams

• Feed the Applied AI product work the grounded, trustworthy context its features depend on.
• Partner with BI and clinical stakeholders so the definitions in the semantic layer match how the business actually reasons about itself.
• Work with the platform team so agents query your data through governed, well-understood paths.

Requirements for the role

• 6+ years of experience as an engineer who builds trustworthy systems.
• Hands‑on experience with dbt and SQL at production scale including orchestration with Dagster, Airflow, or equivalent.
• Experience owning operational or reverse-ETL data systems that other applications depend on in production.
• Experience designing or maintaining a semantic layer or a metrics layer.
• An understanding of how LLMs consume structured context and fluent daily use of AI assistants tooling (Claude, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent) for engineering and within data analytics.
• A demonstrated ability to scale AI adoption to accelerate collaborative work with your peers.
• Drawn to mission‑oriented work, and comfortable partnering with BI, clinical, and product stakeholders whose expertise differs from yours.

How we define success

• Operational data is correct, fresh, and reliable, and the systems that depend on it trust it without manual checks.
• We can rely on our AI systems to leverage data correctly.
• Stakeholders increasingly answer their own questions through self‑serve analytics.

Nice to have, but not required

• A CS degree or equivalent.
• Prior work in a regulated or compliance‑heavy environment (HIPAA, SOC 2, or similar).
• Direct experience in BigQuery
• Exposure to healthcare and clinical data, including ADT, HEDIS, CMS Stars
• Experience building self‑serve analytics adopted by non‑technical stakeholders.

We take into account an individual’s qualifications, skillset, and experience in determining final salary. This role is eligible for health insurance, life insurance, retirement benefits, participation in the company’s equity program, paid time off, including vacation and sick leave. The actual offer will be at the company’s sole discretion and determined by relevant business considerations, including the final candidate’s qualifications, years of experience, skillset, and geographic location. The expected salary range for this position is:

$153,000.00 - $210,000.00 Annual

Cityblock values diversity as a core tenet of the work we do and the populations we serve. We are an equal opportunity employer, indiscriminate of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.

We do not accept unsolicited resumes from outside recruiters/placement agencies. Cityblock will not pay fees associated with resumes presented through unsolicited means.