Senior Data Engineer

Protera Health is a musculoskeletal specialty care company that partners with health plans, health systems, and employers to deliver coordinated, measurable MSK care through clinical services and technology. The Senior Data Engineer will build and scale the data platform supporting clinical operations, payer reporting, analytics, and AI initiatives, while owning pipelines, cloud infrastructure, data modeling, observability, reporting, and security compliance. This hands-on senior individual contributor will collaborate across clinical, technology, finance, and compliance teams and serve as the technical lead for the data engineering domain.

Responsibilities:

• Pipeline Engineering: Build and orchestrate (via Mage) ingestion pipelines (SFTP, APIs, EHR extracts) and write production-grade Python for transformations, reporting, and internal tooling
• Data Modeling & SQL: Design optimized analytical models (BigQuery) and maintain complex SQL assets (BigQuery, PostgreSQL), balancing scale, performance, and cost
• Infrastructure as Code: Own and manage GCP infrastructure (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Functions, Secret Manager, VPC, IAM) entirely via Terraform
• Observability: Implement robust data quality checks, freshness/volume monitoring, failure alerts, and incident response paths
• Business Intelligence & Reporting: Develop and maintain internal reporting surfaces (Looker Studio, Grafana, Metabase)
• Security & Compliance: 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
• Cross-Functional Strategy: 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)

Requirements:

• Experience: 5+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or a hybrid backend/data role
• Education: Bachelor's in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent experience
• Software Fundamentals: Ability to write, test, debug, ship production code, and utilize structured logging and dependency management
• Demonstrated experience working with healthcare claims data
• Python & SQL Proficiency: Deep expertise in production data pipelines, window functions, CTEs, and query/cost optimization for large tables
• GCP Ecosystem: Hands-on experience with BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Compute Engine, Functions, Logging/Monitoring, Secret Manager, and IAM
• PostgreSQL: Production experience encompassing schema design, indexing, and diagnosing slow queries
• Orchestration & BI: Experience with modern orchestrators (Mage, Airflow, Dagster, dbt) and BI layers (Looker Studio, Power BI, semantic modeling)
• Security & AI Ethics: Demonstrated care handling sensitive data in regulated environments, paired with sound judgment regarding when (and when not) to use AI-assisted coding tools
• Startup Experience: Proven success thriving in fast-paced, lean environments with high autonomy and end-to-end ownership of technical outcomes
• Continuous Tech Evaluation: A 'lifelong learner' mindset with the ability to evaluate and responsibly integrate emerging data technologies
• Healthcare Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with X12 EDI, payer file formats, HL7/FHIR, EHR integrations (Healthie is a strong plus), and HIPAA regulations
• Analytics Background: Foundational data science or basic data analytics skills