Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer

Location: 100% Remote (must be available online 10:00 AM-4:00 PM CT)

About the Role

This role sits within the Data Engineering team, supporting customer-facing analytics and data solutions for an organization focused on the health and human services industry. It combines hands-on data engineering with technical leadership, architecture, data modelling, and mentorship for someone who wants to help shape the platform's technical direction, not just implement requirements handed down from others.

The Lead Data Engineer will take ownership of complex and ambiguous problems, evaluate trade-offs, and drive technical decisions end-to-end. This is a Lead/Principal-level individual contributor role, positioned above the existing technical lead, with a path toward people management as the function grows.

What You'll Do

• Act as a technical leader within Data Engineering, guiding architecture, code quality, and complex problem-solving
• Design, build, and maintain scalable, reliable ELT pipelines
• Own data modelling, transformations, and onboarding of new customer data sources
• Partner with Implementation, Customer Success, Product Engineering, and Analytics to troubleshoot customer-facing data issues
• Improve existing systems through automation, scalability, and reliability
• Lead complex initiatives from architecture through implementation and deployment
• Establish engineering standards around productivity, observability, and consistency
• Mentor and coach other engineers

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 7-10+ years of overall experience, with 5+ years in Data Engineering
• Very strong SQL
• Strong Python for data engineering/ELT
• Strong data modelling and architecture experience
• Large-scale data ingestion and transformation
• Experience with Airflow or similar orchestration frameworks
• Linux experience

Preferred:

• dbt
• Airflow/Astronomer, Dagster, or similar
• PostgreSQL
• MPP database architectures
• Healthcare data experience
• Experience across multiple database technologies

Strong candidates will be able to point to measurable impact for example, improving pipeline reliability, reducing data latency, resolving customer-facing data issues, or leading a successful architecture migration.

Working Style:

As a senior technical leader, this person should be comfortable evaluating trade-offs, making technical recommendations rather than simply executing decisions from others, and operating with a genuine point of view "here are the options, here are the trade-offs, and here's what I recommend."

Tech Stack:

SQL, Python, Airflow, dbt, PostgreSQL

Compensation

Base Salary: $175k+