Principal Data Engineer

Cedar

7d • $246,500 - $311,750 • Hybrid

About The Position

Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S. Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.

Principal Data Architect & Engineer

Why this Job?
Cedar is at a pivotal moment in its technical evolution. We are evolving towards a brand-new, enterprise data platform and model, architected specifically to power the future of Cedar’s product offerings. As the Principal Data Architect, you will be the senior technical authority leading this transition, ensuring our new data foundation is clean, scalable, and cleanly separated from legacy debt.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who loves building production systems at scale and views AI as a massive accelerator for both personal and team productivity.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering and backend systems at scale.
• Experience leading large technical projects with a high accountability mentality, focused on delivering value, with a proven track record of shipping production enterprise systems that customers depend on.
• Deep, hands-on proficiency with a wide range of data and engineering technologies and patterns such as Snowflake, dbt, Liquibase, Fivetran, Airflow, OpenMetadata, Kafka, SQL, Python, Kafka, streaming/event driven architectures, CDC (Change Data Capture), and real-time data processing.
• Experience building production-grade ELT/ETL pipelines and managed complex data transformations in cloud-first environments.
• Experience building "source of truth" systems and a passion for data accuracy.
• Understand how to define and audit key business metrics to ensure they remain resilient to system changes.
• Experience with data validation and reconciliation, comparing pipeline output against source systems and methodically diagnosing discrepancies.
• Experience building data APIs, context systems, or feature stores that power downstream ML/AI applications.
• Ability to spot over-engineering and under-engineering with equal confidence.
• Know how to design for resilience, modularity, and backwards compatibility.
• Prefer incremental milestones over big bang deliverables.
• Ability to translate complex technical risks and trade-offs into business-relevant terms for senior stakeholders and cross-functional partners.
• Avid learner in general, and an adopter of AI engineering tools like Claude Code and Codex.
• Experience directing AI agents to generate complete, high-quality solutions and apply your judgment to test and own the output.

Nice To Haves

• Healthcare Domain Expertise: Demonstrable understanding of healthcare concepts, including revenue cycle management (RCM), billing, and insurance adjudication.

Responsibilities

• Architect the Future-State Data Model & Storage: Lead the design and execution of a new, high-scale data model and storage architecture that lives outside our legacy monolith. You will drive decisions on service boundaries, data ownership, and storage patterns—implementing Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold layers) to ensure progressive data quality refinement—while defining the API contracts that will anchor Cedar’s data strategy for years to come. This includes real-time event-driven pipelines and streaming architectures alongside batch analytics.
• Ensure Metrics Reliability: Own the accuracy and reliability of Cedar’s core business metrics including collection rate, days in AR, and invoice balance tracking. Design validation frameworks that ensure our source of truth remains consistent across all reporting and product surfaces.
• Power Intelligent Agents: Build the real-time data foundations that power Cedar’s AI-driven products, ensuring agents, like Kora, have the context, entity graphs, and metrics they need to act autonomously in revenue cycle workflows and transform the patient experience.
• Design for the Future: Design data models for new product lines that expand Cedar’s presence across the full revenue cycle from pre-service through post-service collections.
• Build Production Code: You are a hands-on builder. You will write, ship, and maintain high-quality production code alongside our team of Data Engineers. You will personally model critical domains and implement the core patterns that the rest of the team will follow.
• Guide and Mentor Engineers: Act as the technical role model for a team of Data Engineers. You will raise the bar for engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, design guidance, and technical mentorship, turning every challenge into a growth opportunity for the team.
• Collaborate: Drive technical alignment across data engineering, platform, and product teams, set priorities, unblock dependencies, and ensure delivery against customer-facing commitments.
• Steward Data Integrity: Define and enforce standards for Cedar's enterprise Data Dictionary and metadata strategy. You will partner with engineering and product to ensure data is accurate, discoverable, and synchronized across all environments.

Benefits

• Competitive pay
• equity (for qualifying roles)
• health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
• Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
• Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally
• Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days
• 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed