Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer

at Zócalo Health 

Remote (Full Time) 

Compensation: $160,000 - $180,000 (per year)

 

About Us

Zócalo Health is a tech-enabled, community-oriented primary care organization serving people who have historically been underserved by the one-size-fits-all healthcare system. We partner with health plans, providers, and community organizations to deliver culturally competent primary care, behavioral health, and social care.

Our model is built for populations with high medical and social complexity, where fragmented care drives poor outcomes and unnecessary cost. We combine local, community-based teams with virtual care and modern technology to deliver coordinated, whole-person care where members live and receive support.

Founded in 2021, Zócalo Health is backed by leading healthcare and mission-aligned investors and is scaling rapidly across states and populations. We are building a durable care platform designed to perform in constrained healthcare environments and to lead the shift toward accountable, value-based care.

 

Role Description

The Senior Data Engineer will join Zócalo Health as we build the data platform that powers analytics, product measurement, and operational visibility across the company. This is a hands-on building role at a foundational stage: you will design and ship the pipelines, ingestion frameworks, and data models that the rest of the company depends on.

The primary focus of this role is establishing a scalable, durable data platform. This includes laying the groundwork for longer-term initiatives such as the longitudinal patient record, population-level analytics, and product instrumentation. You will partner closely with Engineering and Product to ensure the data platform supports roadmap priorities and outcome measurement as the company grows.

This position reports to the Principal Data Engineer and partners closely with Engineering and Product.

 

In your first 12 months, you will:

Build and operate production-grade ingestion pipelines from core clinical, operational, and third-party systems into our Databricks lakehouse

Develop and maintain dbt models that turn raw data into clean, well-documented, analytics-ready datasets

Establish data quality, testing, and monitoring practices that make pipelines reliable and trustworthy

Help shape ingestion patterns and architecture standards alongside the Principal Data Engineer

Enable company-wide metrics for care outcomes and operations

Collaborate with cross-functional leads to develop and iterate on a suite of core operational dashboards, ensuring teams have the self-service tools they need to track company metrics and outcomes.

 

The Senior Data Engineer will contribute in the following ways:

Design, build, and operate production data pipelines across clinical, operational, and third-party systems using API-based ingestion, Change Data Capture (CDC), and event- or webhook-driven patterns

Build and maintain transformation layers in dbt, including tests, documentation, and reusable models

Develop and refine core analytical and longitudinal data models used across the company

Implement testing, monitoring, and observability to ensure data quality, pipeline reliability, and system performance

Apply strong engineering fundamentals to improve the scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency of data systems on AWS and Databricks

Partner with Product to support metric definitions, outcome measurement, and reporting needs

Contribute to engineering standards, code review, and a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous improvement

Partner with business, product, and engineering stakeholders to design and build intuitive data visualizations and dashboards that drive actionable insights and program visibility.

 

Core Technologies (current and planned)

Cloud: AWS

Lakehouse / data platform: Databricks

Transformations: dbt

Languages: SQL and Python (primary languages for ingestion and transformation)

Ingestion patterns: API-based ingestion, Change Data Capture (CDC), and event- or webhook-driven pipelines, including frameworks such as PySpark and Spark Structured Streaming on Databricks

Orchestration: workflow orchestration (e.g., Databricks Workflows or Airflow)

 

Qualifications

5+ years of experience in data or backend engineering roles with significant data platform responsibility

Hands-on experience building and operating production-grade data pipelines and ingestion frameworks

Strong proficiency in SQL and Python for data ingestion, processing, and transformation

Experience with a cloud data platform; experience with AWS and Databricks (or a comparable Spark-based lakehouse) strongly preferred

Experience building SQL-based transformation workflows; hands-on experience with dbt preferred

Strong computer science fundamentals, including comfort reasoning about distributed systems and data processing at scale

Ability to diagnose and resolve performance, reliability, and data quality issues in complex systems

Strong ownership mindset and comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-growing environments

Clear communicator able to partner effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Experience building dashboards or analytical outputs used by executives and frontline teams

 

Preferred Qualifications

Experience working with healthcare, care delivery, or other regulated data environments

Familiarity with HIPAA requirements and handling of sensitive health or customer data

Experience building streaming data pipelines or event-driven architectures

Experience implementing data observability, lineage, or quality monitoring tools

Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and automation in engineering workflows

Early-stage startup experience strongly preferred

 

What you can expect from Zócalo Health

Equity compensation package

Comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, and vision

401k

Flexible PTO policy - take the time you need to recharge

$1,000 home office stipend

We provide the equipment needed for this role.

Opportunity for rapid career progression with plenty of room for personal growth.

You must be authorized to work in the United States. Remote Work can be done from anywhere in the U.S.

 

At Zócalo Health Inc., we see diversity and inclusion as a source of strength in transforming healthcare. We believe building trust and innovation are best achieved through diverse perspectives. To us, acceptance and respect are rooted in an understanding that people do not experience things in the same way, including our healthcare system. Individuals seeking employment at Zócalo Health are considered without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.