Staff Data Engineer

Trial Library

$168K — $230K *
Healthcare
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of data engineering experience, with significant impact in prior roles.
  • Expertise in pipeline engineering with an emphasis on data quality and reliability.
  • Proficient in SQL and PostgreSQL, particularly in schema design and query optimization.
  • Strong programming skills in Python, able to navigate a TypeScript codebase.
  • Extensive AWS knowledge, specifically with Lambda, Fargate, SQS, and RDS.
  • Innovative use of AI coding tools for production systems development.
  • Experience in startup environments, thriving in ambiguity and building from scratch.

Responsibilities

  • Own and manage ingestion and transformation pipelines for patient records.
  • Design reliable, compute-intensive workflows that support high data loads and long-running processes.
  • Ensure end-to-end data quality, including schema design, validation, and transformation logic.
  • Collaborate closely with AI engineers to establish data foundations for patient-trial matching.
  • Work with product engineers to integrate ingested data into user workflows.
  • Monitor production systems, quickly triage issues, and apply pragmatic technology solutions.
  • Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, explaining trade-offs clearly.

Benefits

  • Collaborative culture that values direct communication and low-ego teamwork.
  • Encouragement of autonomous ownership and rapid decision-making.
  • A vibrant work atmosphere enriched with humor and team engagement.
  • Opportunities for professional growth through innovative AI practices.
  • Hybrid work model with flexible in-office requirements.
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're hiring a Staff Data Engineer to own the pipelines that move patient data through our platform, from EMR systems to the workflows our teams use to identify eligible patients for clinical trials and help them enroll.

This is the center of a major architectural shift for us: moving from narrow, human-assisted data pulls to robust, automated integrations that ingest complete patient records. The clean, complete, and trustworthy data you'll manage powers our AI-assisted patient-trial matching. If healthcare data at HIPAA-grade stakes, messy real-world inputs, and pipelines that genuinely change patient outcomes sound like the right problem space, please keep reading.

Our engineering culture values direct communication, strong ownership, and low-ego collaboration. We laugh a lot and use a ton of Slack emojis. We make decisions quickly, give open feedback, and have a strong bias toward action.

How We Build with AI

AI is deeply embedded in how we work, in our product, and in our SDLC. Our embrace of it didn't come from a mandate but from our own desire as engineers to do more, safely. We use it for coding, testing, measuring, and iterating, and we treat it as a genuine competitive advantage. We're looking for someone who shares that instinct: excited to question long-standing processes and think ambitiously about what's possible when you pair strong engineering fundamentals with AI tooling. If you're already building that way, you'll fit right in.

Underneath it all is a modern platform built on AWS (Lambda, Fargate, SQS, RDS, Bedrock) with Pulumi-managed infrastructure. Our backend is primarily TypeScript, and our data layer centers on PostgreSQL and Drizzle. We care about pragmatic architecture, developer velocity, and systems that evolve as fast as our product and AI capabilities do.

Your Responsibilities

You will own the ingestion and transformation pipelines that bring patient records into our platform and shape them into data our matching systems and human experts can trust.

That means designing for reliability in compute-intensive, long-running workflows: the kind of problems where serial processing breaks under load, timeouts become production incidents, and the right architecture (async pipelines, message queues, container-based compute) separates a working feature from a failing one. You'll own data quality end-to-end: schema design, validation, transformation logic, and the monitoring that catches problems before a clinician does.

You'll partner closely with our AI engineers on the data foundations for patient-trial matching and with our product engineers on how ingested data flows into the workflows our users depend on. You'll monitor production, triage issues quickly, and exercise pragmatic judgment by matching technology to business needs.

Your Qualifications

We are looking for a data engineer with 8 or more years of experience, with at least a couple of years operating at staff scope or equivalent impact. Beyond tenure, what matters most is whether you have demonstrated the kind of high-impact ownership this role requires.
  • Strong pipeline engineering: ingestion, transformation, and orchestration of data at meaningful scale, with real attention to data quality and reliability.
  • Deep SQL and PostgreSQL fluency, including schema design and query performance
  • Solid Python and comfort working in a codebase with TypeScript.
  • Deep AWS experience (Lambda, Fargate, SQS, RDS, and the surrounding ecosystem) and the ability to choose the right service for the right job.
  • Proven track record of leveraging AI coding tools creatively and effectively to build production systems.
  • Demonstrated ability to take autonomous ownership, identifying and resolving systemic issues independently.
  • Startup experience, where you have built from scratch at an early-stage company and treated ambiguity as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.
  • Strong systems thinking, encompassing backend architecture, APIs, databases, and scalability under real-world constraints.
  • Clear communication and influence, with the ability to explain trade-offs to both engineers and non-engineers to earn trust through honesty.
  • Healthcare alignment with a genuine interest in improving clinical trial access and health equity; HIPAA experience a strong plus.


Nice to Have

Familiarity with IaC tooling (Terraform, Pulumi, etc), clinical or healthcare data standards (EHR/EMR, HL7/FHIR), and API design patterns are all additive. Experience in a regulated industry is a plus.

$168,000 - $230,000 a year

Compensation & On-Site Requirement

This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco, CA, with a requirement of three days per week in the office; Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The salary range for this position is $168,000-$230,000 per year and reflects a good faith estimate of base pay for candidates working in this location. Final compensation will be based on experience, skills, and qualifications.

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