Senior Data Engineer
About The Position
About Protera Health Protera Health is a musculoskeletal (MSK) specialty care company. We partner with health plans, health systems, and employers to deliver coordinated, measurable MSK care - reducing unnecessary surgery and imaging while getting people back to full function faster. Our clinical model combines specialist physicians, physical therapy, and digital care navigation, wrapped in a technology platform that connects patients, clinicians, and payer partners. This is not a narrow engineering job, an architecture-only role, or a 40-hour-per-week clock-in, clock-out position. We care about ownership, sound judgment, velocity, and outcomes. The right person will have founder-level autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the opportunity to build core systems that affect real patients, clinicians, and healthcare partners. About the Role As a hands-on Senior Data Engineer on a small team, you will build and scale the data platform driving Protera's clinical operations, payer reporting, and analytics. This is a senior individual contributor role reporting to the President. In this role, you will collaborate cross-functionally with clinical, technology, finance, and compliance teams. This role is 100% hands-on; you are expected to be the full technical lead for your domain, not one of several engineers on a layered team. We are seeking a highly capable data engineer with a specialized background in healthcare data and claims processing. Core Technical Stack: In this role, you will lead the development and day-to-day function of the data platform supporting our clinical, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence operations. This is a hands-on, full-stack data role; your responsibilities will span constructing data pipelines, developing and maintaining backend architecture, and integrating modern AI-driven development tools. Experience with production Python, Terraform, GCP infrastructure, CI/CD, and pipeline observability are required. Experience with Healthcare Claims Data: We are looking for someone with deep expertise with PHI and Healthcare claims data. AI Philosophy: We encourage the responsible use of AI development tools but strictly prohibit inputting PHI. You will champion the safe AI principles fundamental to our engineering culture.
Requirements
- 5+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or a hybrid backend/data role.
- Bachelor’s in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent experience.
- Ability to write, test, debug, ship production code, and utilize structured logging and dependency management.
- Demonstrated experience working with healthcare claims data
- Deep expertise in production data pipelines, window functions, CTEs, and query/cost optimization for large tables.
- Hands-on experience with BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Compute Engine, Functions, Logging/Monitoring, Secret Manager, and IAM.
- Production experience encompassing schema design, indexing, and diagnosing slow queries.
- Experience with modern orchestrators (Mage, Airflow, Dagster, dbt) and BI layers (Looker Studio, Power BI, semantic modeling).
- Demonstrated care handling sensitive data in regulated environments, paired with sound judgment regarding when (and when not) to use AI-assisted coding tools.
Nice To Haves
- Proven success thriving in fast-paced, lean environments with high autonomy and end-to-end ownership of technical outcomes.
- A "lifelong learner" mindset with the ability to evaluate and responsibly integrate emerging data technologies.
- Familiarity with X12 EDI, payer file formats, HL7/FHIR, EHR integrations (Healthie is a strong plus), and HIPAA regulations.
- Foundational data science or basic data analytics skills.
Responsibilities
- Build and orchestrate (via Mage) ingestion pipelines (SFTP, APIs, EHR extracts) and write production-grade Python for transformations, reporting, and internal tooling.
- Design optimized analytical models (BigQuery) and maintain complex SQL assets (BigQuery, PostgreSQL), balancing scale, performance, and cost.
- Own and manage GCP infrastructure (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Functions, Secret Manager, VPC, IAM) entirely via Terraform.
- Implement robust data quality checks, freshness/volume monitoring, failure alerts, and incident response paths.
- Develop and maintain internal reporting surfaces (Looker Studio, Grafana, Metabase).
- Design pipelines that adhere to requirements surrounding PHI, ensuring minimum-necessary access, encryption, least-privilege IAM, and audit logging to support our SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, and HITRUST compliance initiatives.
- Collaborate with team members within clinical operations, product, finance, etc. to translate business questions into reliable data products, while contributing to the architecture for future AI/ML initiatives (data preparation, feature engineering).
Benefits
- Fully remote work: work from your home or other private, secured area to help fit your lifestyle
- Competitive compensation, equity and bonus opportunities based on your experience and results delivered
- Paid Time Off (PTO): Generous paid time off that includes vacation days and holidays
- Equity options to benefit from company growth
- Healthcare benefits and 401(k) retirement plan to keep you well and planning for the future
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
