We use data infrastructure to enable more timely and personalized engagement with individuals living with SMI at scale. This allows our team of peers, social workers, and nurse practitioners to plan appropriate care and focus on critical tasks rather than manually searching for information across silos in the healthcare system. This is a unique opportunity to help drive the impact and capabilities of our data team and infrastructure. You will build impactful healthcare technology on a modern technology stack.
This is a remote, individual contributor role reporting directly to the CTO. You'll be the most senior data engineer on a team of 3 (within a 5-person engineering department). This is a technical leadership role - no people management, but broad ownership, autonomy and responsibility to : define and drive excellence in our data platform.
Our data infrastructure is built on Snowflake, DBT (Cloud), Airflow, and Python, with tools like Fivetran and Hightouch. The foundation is solid but not pristine - there's a solid mix of improvements to handle, new features to enable, and running-the-business systems to improve and automate.
Role expectations:
- Responsible for designing, building, and optimizing scaled data infrastructure, serving as a technical lead and mentor within the organization.
- Directly collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to effectively gather requirements and understand business needs in order to create durable pipelines, infrastructure, and ELT models that enable the company to ingest data in various formats and from various sources and then turn them into usable business facing data products.
- Align and coordinate your team's work against strategic business priorities and help define and manage the data roadmap.
- Drive operational excellence by ensuring data quality through automated testing and validation, robust pipeline monitoring and alerting, and establishing clear incident response practices when things break.
- Provide technical leadership through mentorship, architecture reviews, and maintaining high technical standards across the codebase.
- Own data architecture, infrastructure, and platform improvements. Drive systems improvements and upgrades with a long-term view.
- Use systems thinking to solve problems and add capabilities. Adopt tools, technologies, and patterns to provide leverage. Build a platform, don't just get tasks done.
The experience you bring to this role:
- 7+ years of data engineering experience, with deep expertise in technologies like Snowflake, DBT, Airflow, and Python. You've architected data systems for reliability and scale, not just built pipelines to spec.
- A track record with ambiguous initiatives that required breaking down complex problems, coordinating across engineering and business teams, and delivering outcomes.
- Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to represent your team's work and direction to non-technical leadership, and to translate business needs into technical strategy that others can follow.
- Experience enabling team leverage through mentorship, establishing technical standards, and guiding stakeholders through capability tradeoffs; you make the people and systems around you better.
Bonus:
- Familiarity with healthcare data: claims, pharmacy data, interoperability specs (HL7/FHIR, X12, etc) is at the core of what we do.
We firmly believe that great candidates for this role may not meet 100% of the criteria listed in this posting. We encourage you to apply anyway - we look forward to begin getting to know you.
Benefits
For full-time employees, our compensation package includes base, equity (or a special incentive program for clinical roles) and performance bonus potential. Our benefits include physical and mental health, dental, vision, 401(k) with a match, 16 weeks parental leave for either parent, 15 days/year vacation in your first year (this increases to 20 days/year in your second year and beyond), and a supportive and inclusive culture.
Similar Jobs at firsthand Health Inc
What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
- Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

