Principal Data Engineer

Zócalo Health

7h • Remote

About The Position

The Principal Data Engineer will join Zócalo Health at a defining moment for the company. As we scale across markets and value-based care arrangements, we are investing in the data platform required to operate reliably, measure outcomes, and support product and care delivery at scale. Today, core pieces of that data foundation do not yet exist. This role exists to build them.
You will own the design and implementation of Zócalo Health’s data infrastructure. You will build the underlying systems, pipelines, and data models that enable analytics, product measurement, and operational visibility across the company.
Your work will support near-term needs such as business and operational visibility, but 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.
In your first 12 months, you will:
Design and launch our first production-grade data warehouse
Implement reliable ingestion from core clinical and operational systems
Establish data quality and monitoring standards used across engineering
Enable company-wide metrics for care outcomes and operations
This position reports to the VP, Engineering and partners closely with Product, Clinical, Operations, and Finance leaders.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering or backend engineering roles with significant data platform responsibility
• Proven experience designing and building data infrastructure, pipelines, and data models from the ground up
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including comfort reasoning about distributed systems and data processing at scale
• Hands-on experience with modern data platforms and tooling, including SQL-based transformation workflows
• Experience building and operating production-grade data pipelines
• 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

Nice To Haves

• 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
• Experience building dashboards or analytical outputs used by executives and frontline teams
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and automation in engineering workflows
• Early stage startup experience strongly preferred

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end design of Zócalo Health’s data platform, including warehouse, lake, and ingestion architecture
• Build and operate production data pipelines across clinical, operational, and third-party systems (APIs, CDC, events)
• Define core analytical and longitudinal data models used across the company
• Build robust data ingestion frameworks, including Change Data Capture (CDC), API-based ingestion, and event or webhook-driven pipelines
• Implement testing, monitoring, and observability practices to ensure data quality, pipeline reliability, and system performance
• Apply strong engineering fundamentals to improve scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency of data systems
• Partner with Product to ensure data systems support metric definitions, outcome measurement, and roadmap prioritization

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

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