Senior Research Data Engineer

Role Description

PointClickCare’s Advanced Technology / AI Applied Research team designs, builds, tunes, evaluates, and delivers AI model systems on clinical and operational data to help providers deliver excellent care. The Senior Applied Research Engineer ensures we have data in the right shape to develop and deliver that AI safely, effectively, and significantly more efficiently than today.

You will build and own the gold data layer that sits between our silver Lakehouse data and the AI work that depends on it, including:

• Building, validating, documenting, and extending the gold data layer as products evolve.
• Creating a highly leveraged asset relied on by multiple AI model system creators across the full R&D lifecycle.

This role blends data engineering with applied AI data science, requiring collaboration with:

• AI researchers to understand their needs.
• Data platform, product, clinical, and workflow experts to understand data transformation.

What You’ll Do

• Own the gold data layer.
• Transform messy, silver tables into curated, semantically rich, clean, and documented gold datasets suitable for AI model development.
• Maintain the data as products and needs evolve.
• Reverse-engineer data semantics.
• Bridge semantics with AI needs.
• Curate datasets across modalities.
• Build pipelines for reuse.
• Automate quality, filtering, and synthesis.
• Version and hand off datasets.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production data systems, with at least 2 supporting ML or AI workloads.
• Track record of learning complex new data domains quickly.
• Advanced Python, SQL, and PySpark/Databricks for working with large, messy data.
• Expert SQL skills, comfortable reading complex stored procedures.
• Databricks ecosystem depth: Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark/PySpark tuning, MLflow.
• AI domain literacy: understanding of embeddings, tokenization, feature engineering, etc.
• Data wrangling across modalities.
• Experience with AI-friendly data formats and storage layout decisions.
• Data quality, filtering, and synthesis pipelines experience.
• Pipeline orchestration and dataset versioning experience.
• Experience handling regulated or sensitive data under controlled access.
• Git-based version control and CI/CD for data and code.
• Strong written documentation skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, engineering, statistics, or related field.

Requirements

• Hands-on EHR data experience, ideally in skilled nursing, long-term care, post-acute care, or senior living.
• Working knowledge of clinical terminologies and data standards.
• Experience with dbt for transformation and testing.
• Familiarity with training-side ML frameworks.
• Clinical NLP, OCR, document parsing, or ASR/transcript pipeline experience.
• Data lineage and catalog tools experience.
• Prior experience embedded inside an AI or ML research team.
• Master’s degree in a relevant quantitative or computer science field.

Benefits

• Benefits starting from Day 1!
• Retirement Plan Matching.
• Flexible Paid Time Off.
• Wellness Support Programs and Resources.
• Parental & Caregiver Leaves.
• Fertility & Adoption Support.
• Continuous Development Support Program.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Allyship and Inclusion Communities.
• Employee Recognition … and more!