Sr. Data Engineer (Data Platforms)

Sr. Data Engineer (Data Platforms)

Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.

Cedar's mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a "one-size-fits-all" approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.

The Role

Cedar's Data & Integration Platforms organization builds the data infrastructure, pipelines and tooling that power our products, analytics, and financial operations. We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help evolve our data ecosystem from homegrown ETL scripts to a modern, scalable stack built on tools like dbt, Airflow and Snowflake.

You will design and own critical data pipelines (e.g., client billing, product analytics, and platform data services), improve data quality and observability, and help define patterns and standards for how Cedar builds and operates data products. This is a high-impact individual contributor role with significant autonomy, technical ownership, and cross-functional exposure.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and own scalable ELT/ETL pipelines that power core use cases including client billing, financial reporting, product analytics and data services for downstream teams (Finance, Data Science, Commercial Analytics, Product).
• Modernize legacy data flows by migrating SQL- and Liquibase-based transformations into dbt, with robust testing, documentation and data contracts.
• Improve reliability and observability of our data platform by implementing best practices in testing, monitoring, alerting and runbook-driven operations for pipelines orchestrated via Airflow (and/or similar tools).
• Model data for usability and performance in Snowflake and other systems, applying dimensional and domain-driven design patterns where appropriate (e.g., for analytics core models and financial engineering services).
• Partner closely with product, finance, analytics and integrations teams to understand requirements, define interfaces, and ensure data is accurate, well-documented, and delivered in the right form and cadence for consumers.
• Contribute to Cedar's data platform vision by helping decouple data infrastructure from data services, establishing standards for governance, metadata, and access, and piloting tools like OpenMetadata and data quality frameworks.
• Provide technical mentorship to other engineers, upleveling our data engineering practices in areas like code quality, reviews, architecture, and operational excellence.
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term architecture, making pragmatic trade-offs while moving us toward a clear "North Star" data platform that supports emerging use cases like AI/ML, personalization and experimentation.

About You

• 5+ years of hands-on data engineering (or closely related software engineering) experience, including ownership of production data pipelines and systems at scale.
• Strong SQL and Python proficiency, with experience building data transformations, utilities and tooling (e.g., dbt models, Airflow DAGs, internal libraries).
• Deep experience with modern data stack tools, including several of: Snowflake (or similar cloud data warehouse), dbt, Airflow/Dagster (or similar orchestrator).
• Proven track record designing and operating reliable pipelines, including testing strategies (unit/integration/dbt tests), monitoring, alerting, and incident/root-cause analysis for data issues.
• Experience with data modeling and schema design for analytics, reporting and operational use cases (e.g., dimensional models, entity-centric designs, or medallion-style architectures).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, ideally AWS (e.g., use of S3, IAM, containerized workloads, or related infrastructure supporting data workloads).
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical requirements and to work effectively with partners across engineering, product and business teams.
• High ownership and bias to action in complex, evolving environments—comfortable operating with partial information, making trade-offs explicit, and driving work to completion.

Bonus Points

• Experience with metadata and data governance tools, such as OpenMetadata, DataHub or similar catalogs, and implementing data contracts or quality frameworks (e.g., Great Expectations, dbt tests).
• Exposure to streaming and event-driven data pipelines (e.g., Kafka, CDC tools) and integrating those into warehouse-centric architectures.
• Prior experience in healthcare, fintech, or other highly regulated domains, particularly with standards like HL7 or FHIR, or with complex billing/financial data flows.
• Familiarity with analytics and visualization tools (e.g., Looker, Hex) and enabling self-serve analytics through well-designed semantic layers and models.
• Experience helping define team-level standards, patterns, and roadmaps for data engineering or platform teams.

Compensation Range and Benefits:

• Salary Range*: $195,500 - $247,250
• This role is equity eligible
• This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package

*Subject to location, experience, and education

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What do we offer to the ideal candidate?

• A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
• Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
• For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
• 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
• Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: View email address on click.appcast.io (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians)
• Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
• Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
• Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally

About us

Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.