Lead Data Engineer - Healthcare Data & Audience Applications

Role Description

Zeta Global is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to build and scale healthcare-focused applications and data systems that power audience intelligence, activation, measurement, and reporting across both HCP and DTC workflows. This is a hands-on technical leadership role operating at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and healthcare domain constraints. You will design and deliver systems that integrate identity, audience data, and campaign performance while meeting strict requirements for privacy, compliance, and reliability. The ideal candidate brings strong system design depth, experience building data-intensive platforms, and the ability to lead through architecture and execution in regulated environments.

What You’ll Build

• Applications supporting HCP and patient / direct-to-consumer (DTC) audience discovery, segmentation, and activation
• Scalable data pipelines for ingestion, normalization, and enrichment of healthcare datasets
• Identity resolution and data linkage services across fragmented data sources
• Reporting, attribution, and measurement systems connecting campaigns to outcomes
• APIs and services enabling downstream activation, analytics, and partner integrations
• Healthcare Cloud and data-mapping architecture across claims/Rx, NPI/HCP, patient, media-exposure, brand, and connector datasets
• Healthcare-specific semantic cubes, governed views, data contracts, and domain APIs consumed by Vertical Apps
• Identity resolution, match-rate measurement, medical-code mapping, and approved joins under CERT/HIPAA rules
• Foundational data products for NPI onboarding, PLD reporting, script reporting, HCP/Patient intelligence, journeys, and Next Best Action

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the healthcare data architecture, interface contracts, ADRs, schemas, and staged delivery plan
• Lead ingestion and transformation patterns across Snowflake, Athena/S3, MySQL, and approved healthcare stores
• Partner with Data Cloud on source certification, partner-feed contracts, identity validation, raw-zone ownership, and data availability SLAs
• Design healthcare base/vertical models and published/governed views, with row/member-level controls, account scoping, masking, and backward-compatible versioning
• Set SLOs and operational readiness criteria; ensure dashboards, alerts, runbooks, rollback paths, and incident ownership are in place before release
• Lead design and code reviews, mentor the Senior Data Engineer, and coordinate dependencies across the pod
• Support compliance evidence, annual audits, US data-residency controls, and stoplight decisions: Start, Stop, or Requires CERT
• Apply privacy-by-design principles across all systems handling PHI/PII
• Partner with Product and Data teams to translate healthcare requirements into scalable architectures
• Drive engineering best practices across testing, CI/CD, code quality, and operational excellence

Engineering Expectations

• Strong experience designing distributed systems, including microservices and event-driven architectures
• Deep understanding of data modeling, storage systems (OLTP and OLAP), and data-processing frameworks
• Experience with streaming and batch processing technologies, such as Kafka, Spark, Flink, or similar tools
• Proficiency in backend development using Python, Java, or Ruby, as well as API design using REST or gRPC
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools, such as Apache Airflow
• Experience working with data warehouses and lakehouse platforms, such as Snowflake, Databricks, or similar technologies
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure as code
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience implementing observability practices, including logging, metrics, and tracing, as well as reliability patterns
• Strong understanding of performance optimization and scalability trade-offs

Healthcare & Domain Expectations

• Experience working with HCP data (provider identity, targeting, segmentation)
• Experience with patient / DTC data workflows and privacy-aware systems
• Understanding of healthcare data ecosystems (claims, provider, or audience datasets)
• Familiarity with identity graphs and data onboarding patterns
• Experience building reporting or attribution systems tied to business outcomes
• Strong grasp of HIPAA, PHI/PII, and regulated data handling requirements
• Technical standards for lineage, data quality, access control, masking, retention, auditability, observability, and cost

Qualifications

• 8+ years of data engineering experience with increasing technical ownership
• Expert SQL and strong Python, Java; experience with batch and streaming patterns, orchestration, testing, and schema evolution
• Proven track record of building and scaling data-intensive or distributed systems
• Experience working in regulated environments (healthcare strongly preferred)
• Strong system design and architecture skills
• Ability to lead technically while remaining hands-on in implementation
• Strong collaboration skills across engineering, product, and data teams

Preferred

• Experience with healthcare data providers or identity ecosystems
• Background in AdTech, MarTech, or audience/data platforms
• Experience with privacy-enhancing technologies (tokenization, clean rooms)
• Exposure to ML/AI-driven data products or analytics systems

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee Equity
• Employee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, and Pet Insurance
• And more!!

Salary Range

The salary range for this role is $180,000 - $200,000, depending on location and experience.

People & Culture at Zeta

Zeta considers applicants for employment without regard to, and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, race, color, religion, age, disability, status as a veteran, or national or ethnic origin; nor does Zeta discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. We’re committed to building a workplace culture of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work. We provide a forum for employees to celebrate, support and advocate for one another.