Senior Engineer - Data Engineering Lead

Role Description

You will own the data path for PressW's healthcare scheduling platform rebuild (codename Phoenix), reporting to the Principal Engineer. Decomposing a large monolith without breaking the business is primarily a data problem. The legacy database is multi-TB with a degraded schema: no normalization, circular references, denormalized god tables, column-based multi-tenancy, and inconsistent naming. New code never sees any of this. You build the translation layer that makes that possible, design the clean target schema, and execute the cutover that moves 1,000+ customers from old to new.

Responsibilities

• Lead the database schema assessment early in the engagement.
• Map the full legacy data model, identify structural problems (circular references, denormalized tables, missing constraints), and classify tables by access patterns.
• Design the clean target schema in collaboration with the Backend Lead and Principal Engineer.
• Build and own the translation layer between the legacy schema and the new backend: PostgreSQL views and materialized views for reads, write mapper modules for writes.
• Own the data contract between old and new systems.
• Plan and execute the per-tenant data cutover from legacy schema to the target schema.
• Own database performance tuning during the migration.
• Instrument data quality, lineage, and audit capabilities sufficient for a healthcare context.
• Mentor engineers on the team on data fundamentals.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of data engineering experience. Strong Python and SQL.
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise beyond writing good queries.
• Hands-on experience with a large migration or rebuild where two systems ran in parallel and data had to stay consistent across both.
• Experience designing schemas from degraded or legacy starting points.
• Production AWS experience, particularly Aurora and related data services.
• Must have shipped meaningful work in the last 2 years.

Preferred

• Healthcare data, HIPAA, PHI handling.
• Experience with additive-only migration strategies.
• Event-driven architectures and streaming (Kafka).
• SQLAlchemy and Alembic experience.
• AI-assisted development workflows (Claude Code, agent frameworks, MCP).

Benefits

• Data migration is where rebuilds live and die. You own the most critical technical path on the engagement: the translation layer, the target schema, and the cutover.
• Small team, high autonomy, real stakes.

Company Description

PressW is where some of the world's most ambitious companies come to actually ship AI. We're redefining how businesses harness AI by building real systems for real clients, not just selling slides about what's possible. We're a team of three exited AI founders and a group of Applied AI Engineers based in Austin, and we've been heads-down for the last few years building this firm into something we're proud of: more than 70 production AI solutions shipped, 40+ clients across seven industries, and over $50M in measurable profit gains delivered.