Lead Data Engineer, Data Platform

Vida Health is a virtual, personalized obesity care provider that uses evidence-based treatment to help patients manage obesity and related conditions. They are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to own the reliability and integrity of the data platform that powers their clinical programs, billing, and partner reporting, ensuring accurate and resilient data pipelines.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end reliability for core data pipelines—from ingestion through billing and reporting outputs
• Build observability foundations: health dashboards, tiered alerting and on-call signals that are actionable, not noisy
• Harden data ingestion with typed staging, quarantine patterns, freshness gates and safe backfill and replay capabilities
• Enforce schema contracts and quality validation so failures are caught in CI, not discovered by stakeholders
• Establish clear boundaries between governed core data and downstream BI and reporting layers
• Lead incident retrospectives that fix root causes, not just symptoms, and reduce future on-call burden
• Mentor 2–4 data engineers through code reviews, pairing and growth conversations

Requirements:

• Bachelors Degree at a minimum
• 7+ years in data engineering, with meaningful ownership of production pipelines and quality systems
• Deep dbt experience—you've maintained real deployments, not just prototypes
• Strong SQL and data modeling instincts, with an eye for performance and cost
• Python fluency for tooling, validation and automation
• Hands-on experience with data quality monitoring: contracts, freshness checks, schema enforcement and alerting
• Have led or mentored small engineering teams, formally or informally
• You think in systems—and you fix root causes, not just symptoms