Staff Data Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Synthesis Health

Who We Are

We're a mission- and values-driven company with tremendous dedication to our customers. Our 100% remote team is dedicated to a common goal – to revolutionize healthcare through innovation, collaboration, and commitment to our core values and behaviors.

About the Opportunity

We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer who serves as the universal data architect for our platform.

In this role, you will bridge the gap between application engineering and data infrastructure. You will possess a "big picture" understanding of our entire data ecosystem—OLTP, OLAP, NoSQL, and Relational. You will own the optimization of our high-volume data pipelines, but equally, you will tune the operational databases that power our services and design the warehousing strategies that drive our analytics.

You will be the authority on data physics: defining how we ingest massive bursts of medical information, how we model it for high-performance transactional locking, and how we transform it for analytical querying without friction.

This is a high-leverage leadership role. You will set the standard for data engineering excellence, mentoring Senior engineers and defining the architectural patterns that keep our platform performant as we scale 100x and beyond.

Key Responsibilities

Polyglot Data Architecture & Performance

• Universal Store Optimization: You will be the ultimate authority on the performance of our persistent stores. You will tune AlloyDB (PostgreSQL) for complex transactions (OLTP), optimize NoSQL layers, and structure BigQuery for analytical speed (OLAP).
• Prevent Congestion & Latency: You will proactively identify and resolve "hot spots" in our data architecture. You will design strategies for sharding, partitioning, and active-archiving that ensure our operational systems remain lean while our analytical history grows indefinitely.

High-Volume Pipeline & Ingestion Strategy

• Ingestion at Scale: You will architect robust, backpressure-aware pipelines to handle high-throughput ingestion of HL7 and DICOM metadata. You will ensure our systems can absorb bursty traffic without degrading the user experience.
• Stream & Batch Convergence: You will design the flows that move data from operational stores to our data warehouse, ensuring freshness and consistency. You will determine when to use real-time streams versus batch processing to balance cost and latency.

Service Design & Data Governance

• Define Data Contracts: You will act as a key voice on the Architecture Review Board (ARB), defining the "rules of the road" for how microservices interact with the data layer. You will enforce strict data contracts that decouple services from the underlying storage engine.
• Mentorship: You will elevate the data engineering capabilities of the entire organization. You will mentor other engineers on advanced query optimization, data modeling (Star Schema vs. 3NF), and the nuances of distributed data consistency.

What We're Looking For

• Elite Data Engineering Experience: 8+ years of experience designing and optimizing data-intensive applications. You have a track record of solving hard scaling problems across the entire data lifecycle.
• Universal Data Fluency: You have deep expertise across the spectrum: Relational (AlloyDB/PostgreSQL internals, MVCC, locking), NoSQL (Document stores, Key-Value), and Warehousing (BigQuery/Snowflake internals, columnar storage).
• Pipeline Proficiency: Expert-level knowledge of building and optimizing data pipelines using tools like Kafka/PubSub, Beam/Dataflow, or dbt. You understand how to handle late data, duplicates, and exactly-once processing.
• Service & System Design: You understand how data stores fit into a broader microservices architecture. You can design synchronous vs. asynchronous data access patterns that protect the database from application-layer thundering herds.
• Coding Skills: Strong proficiency in Python, Java, SQL. You write clean, maintainable code for infrastructure and data transformation.
• Performance Obsession: You have a proven ability to debug complex data performance issues, from tuning query execution plans and resolving lock contention to optimizing high-throughput ingestion pipelines for minimal lag.

Preferred Qualifications

• Healthcare Data: Familiarity with the specific challenges of healthcare data (DICOM hierarchy, HL7 message structures) and compliance (HIPAA).
• Real-Time Analytics: Experience architecting real-time analytics dashboards or hybrid transactional/analytical workflows.
• Migration Experience: Experience leading zero-downtime database migrations or major schema refactors in a 24/7 environment.

Why You Should Join Us

• Solve Our Toughest Puzzles: This is a high-leverage role. You will be working on the most impactful technical challenges that are critical to the company's success.
• Define the Architecture: You won't just be maintaining a system; you will be a primary author of its future state, with the autonomy to make it happen.
• Lead from the Front: This is a chance to establish yourself as a key technical voice in a rapidly growing company.
• Competitive Compensation & Benefits: We offer a strong salary, a 100% remote culture, and significant opportunities for growth.

We are a values-driven company. Our values:

• Clinical service first.
• Collaborate with our customers.
• Listen, respect, learn.
• Innovate to excel.

The behaviors we look for:

• Be nice.
• Be creative.
• Be honest.
• Be helpful.

Compensation and Benefits

Typical salary range for this position is $120,000 - $150,000 (CAD). However, Synthesis participates in location based hiring and salary ranges can be adjusted based on candidate's residence.

Other benefits include, but are not limited to: Medical, Dental, Vision, "Use as needed" vacation policy, and participation in our employee option program.