Head of Data Engineering

Pivotal Health is a technology platform that helps healthcare providers get paid fairly in a complex reimbursement landscape. The Head of Data Engineering will own the platform, architecture, and team powering the company’s end-to-end data infrastructure, modernizing it into a scalable, distributed, high-throughput system. The role also leads engineering teams, establishes software engineering best practices, and ensures secure data lifecycle management for healthcare, AI/ML, and internal services.

Responsibilities:

• Evolve & Modernize Data Infrastructure: Inherit and assess our existing data systems, charting a pragmatic path to scale them using modern, code-driven software patterns and cloud-native tools
• Build a Software-First Engineering Team: Hire, mentor, and lead a team of high-caliber software engineers who specialize in data pipelines, data processing, and database internals
• Build the Platform, Not the Schema: Product, Engineering, AI, Business Intelligence teams are your primary customers. Provide the infrastructure, streaming/batch frameworks, and APIs so product teams can own their domain models and schemas
• Own the Data Lifecycle: Build robust, observable, high-performing capabilities for ingesting, transforming, storing, and exposing data for the IDR platform, AI/ML models, and internal services
• Promote Software Engineering Best Practices: Employ rigorous software engineering practices across data pipelines including automated testing, IaC, version control, and observability
• Security & Compliance Hardening: Implement programmatically enforced security, access controls, and privacy guardrails for sensitive data

Requirements:

• You come from a strong Software Engineering background and moved into data/infrastructure space because you love building data-intensive distributed systems
• 10+ years in software / data infrastructure with proven experience in inheriting an existing platform architecture rather than needing a greenfield slate
• Deep hands-on experience with modern, code first data architectures (event streaming, distributed processing, modern lakehouses, containerized orchestration). You focus on systems engineering over legacy systems=
• You understand schema and domain model ownership belongs to the engineering team. You excel at building internal tools and APIs that make data publishing/consumption frictionless
• Able to review system design, weigh trade-offs between speed and technical debt, and stay close enough to the technology to earn the respect of senior engineers
• Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future employer sponsorship
• Experience with real-time/event driven healthcare or financial data streams (claims, clinical data, financial transactions)
• Background in HealthTech, FinTech, or another regulated industry handling sensitive data
• Experience building data platform specifically optimized for LLMs, product engineering, and production ML pipelines
• Strong familiarity with HIPAA, PHI, zero trust security patterns in cloud environments