Performant Financial

Sr. Data Engineer, Payment Operations

Performant Financial$127K — $160K *
Healthcare
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience.
  • 7 years of data engineering experience, with 3 years in Snowflake environments.
  • Expert SQL skills, including performance tuning and recursive CTEs.
  • Hands-on experience with Snowflake-native features such as Snowpipe and clustering.
  • Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar data architectures.
  • Experience with production data pipelines and data quality controls.
  • Familiarity with job scheduling tools like Automic or Airflow.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain Snowflake tables and pipelines for payment monitoring.
  • Activate monitoring scenarios in sequenced sprints based on priority.
  • Maintain Payment Lifecycle KPI calculation pipeline with automated refresh schedule.
  • Implement data quality controls in payment pipelines.
  • Lead as the Snowflake expert, guiding technical sessions with teams.
  • Document data architecture, including schemas and data flows.
  • Translate business monitoring needs into technical implementations for stakeholders.

Benefits

  • 401k plan with employer match.
  • Flexible paid time off and holidays.
  • Parental leave and life/disability insurance.
  • Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage.
Full Job Description
Position Overview
The Senior Data Engineer leads the engineering workstreams that underpin the Payment Operations monitoring transformation program at Zelis. This role designs, builds, and maintains Snowflake data pipelines; activates payment monitoring scenarios; and delivers the KPI infrastructure used for executive reporting across multiple platforms. As the primary Snowflake subject matter expert for Payment Operations, the role also strengthens data literacy, documents the data architecture, and provides technical guidance that enables the broader operations organization to use data more independently.

Key Responsibilities
  • Payment Monitoring Engineering: Design, build, deploy, and maintain Snowflake tables and pipelines that support payment monitoring. Develop stored procedures, status-specific delay thresholds, business-day-aware timing windows, and root cause diagnostic tagging. Maintain the combined platform monitoring table that supports top-down alerting across the full payment lifecycle.
  • Monitoring Scenario Activation: Execute activation of inactive monitoring scenarios in sequenced sprints with prioritization based on cost, risk, and revenue exposure.
  • KPI Infrastructure: Design and maintain the Payment Lifecycle KPI calculation pipeline, including query logic, data joins across tables and source payment records, and automated refresh cadence - with slicing by any required dimension such as platform, payer, and payment modality.
  • Data Quality Management: Establish and maintain data quality controls within payment pipelines, including forward-fill logic, export grouping, source system column validation, and definitional consistency checks between payment-related data sources.
  • Technical Leadership and Enablement: Serve as the primary Snowflake subject matter expert for Payment Operations. Lead working sessions with onshore and offshore partners to build practical SQL and Snowflake proficiency, review technical approaches, and promote maintainable engineering practices.
  • Architecture and Documentation: Document the Payment Operations data architecture, including platform schemas, table structures, data flows, dependencies, stored procedures, operational runbooks, and monitoring logic to ensure knowledge is accurate, transferable, and sustainable.
  • Cross-Functional Partnership: Translate business monitoring needs into scalable technical solutions and communicate technical findings, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations in clear language to operations leaders and non-technical stakeholders.


Required Qualifications
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent professional experience in lieu of degree.
  • 7 years of experience in data engineering, with at least 3 years in production Snowflake environments.
  • Expert SQL proficiency, including recursive common table expressions, stored procedures, and performance tuning on large-scale datasets.
  • Hands-on experience with Snowflake-native patterns, including Snowpipe, streams and tasks, clustering, and virtual warehouse configuration.
  • Demonstrated ability to absorb an unfamiliar data architecture quickly - reading existing schemas, reverse-engineering legacy stored procedures, and mapping undocumented data flows.
  • Experience building and supporting production data pipelines, monitoring workflows, automated batch processes, and data quality controls.
  • Experience with enterprise job scheduling tools such as Automic, Airflow, or dbt Cloud for managing production batch workloads.


Preferred Skills
  • Experience working as an embedded data engineer within a business operations team, with the ability to translate technical work into plain language for non-technical colleagues.
  • Comfort working with AI tools and applying them to accelerate data engineering workflows, analysis, and documentation.
  • Experience in healthcare payment processing, including ACH, EDI 835 delivery, virtual card (VCC or VRA), or provider payment disbursement workflows.
  • Familiarity with SIGMA or equivalent cloud-native BI platforms (Looker, Hex, or similar) connected to a Snowflake backend.
  • Exposure to HIPAA-compliant data handling practices and healthcare data governance frameworks.
  • Experience conducting peer reviews of SQL or pipeline code in a cross-functional setting.
  • Snowflake SnowPro Core or Advanced certification.


Please note at this time we are unable to proceed with candidates who require visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Location and Workplace Flexibility

Zelis is headquartered in the U.S., with multiple locations across the country and in Hyderabad, India. Check out our locations to learn more about our offices. All employee work locations are based on the needs of the position and are determined by the Leadership team. In-office work and activities vary based on work and team objectives in accordance with Company policies.

While location expectations vary by role, candidates within approximately 50 miles of a U.S. office are generally preferred to support collaboration when needed. Our hybrid approach is flexible, and in-office presence is guided by team and business needs rather than a fixed weekly schedule.

Base Salary Range
$127,000.00 - $160,550.00

At Zelis we are committed to providing fair and equitable compensation packages. The base salary range allows us to make an offer that considers multiple individualized factors, including experience, education, qualifications, as well as job-related and industry-related knowledge and skills, etc. Base pay is just one part of our Total Rewards package, which may also include discretionary bonus plans, commissions, or other incentives depending on the role.

Zelis' full-time associates are eligible for a highly competitive benefits package as well, which demonstrates our commitment to our employees' health, well-being, and financial protection. The US-based benefits include a 401k plan with employer match, flexible paid time off, holidays, parental leaves, life and disability insurance, and health benefits including medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage.

About Performant Financial

Performant Financial Corporation is a business services company that provides technology-enabled recovery and related analytics services in the United States. The company primarily offers recovery services to the government and private clients in various markets, such as healthcare, student loans, and general collections. Performant Financial Corporation was founded in 1976 and is headquartered in Livermore, California.
Learn more about Performant Financial
Size
1,269 employees
Market Cap
$237.8 million
Industry
Net Income
-$21.5 million
Founded
1976
5 Year Trend
-2.5%
Revenue
$159.7 million
NASDAQ

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