Staff Data Engineer

firsthand supports individuals living with SMI (serious mental illness). Our holistic approach includes a team of peer recovery specialists, benefits specialists and clinicians. Our teams focus on meeting each individual where they are and walking with them side by side as a trusted guide and partner on their journey to better health.

firsthand's team members use their lived experience to build trust with these individuals and support them in reconnecting to the healthcare they need, while minimizing inappropriate healthcare utilization. Together with our health plan partners, we are changing the way our society supports those most impacted by SMI.

We are cultivating a team of deeply passionate problem-solvers to tackle significant and complex healthcare challenges with us. This is more than a job—it's a calling. Every day, you will engage in work that resonates with purpose, gain wisdom from motivated colleagues, and thrive in an environment that celebrates continuous learning, creativity, and fun.

We use data infrastructure to enable more timely and personalized engagement with individuals living with SMI at scale. This allows our team of peers, social workers, and nurse practitioners to plan appropriate care and focus on critical tasks rather than manually searching for information across silos in the healthcare system. This is a unique opportunity to help drive the impact and capabilities of our data team and infrastructure. You will build impactful healthcare technology on a modern technology stack.

This is a remote, individual contributor role reporting directly to the CTO. You'll be the most senior data engineer on a team of 3 (within a 5-person engineering department). This is a technical leadership role - no people management, but broad ownership, autonomy and responsibility to : define and drive excellence in our data platform.

Our data infrastructure is built on Snowflake, DBT (Cloud), Airflow, and Python, with tools like Fivetran and Hightouch. The foundation is solid but not pristine - there's a solid mix of improvements to handle, new features to enable, and running-the-business systems to improve and automate.

Role expectations:

• Responsible for designing, building, and optimizing scaled data infrastructure, serving as a technical lead and mentor within the organization.

• Directly collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to effectively gather requirements and understand business needs in order to create durable pipelines, infrastructure, and ELT models that enable the company to ingest data in various formats and from various sources and then turn them into usable business facing data products.

• Align and coordinate your team's work against strategic business priorities and help define and manage the data roadmap.

• Drive operational excellence by ensuring data quality through automated testing and validation, robust pipeline monitoring and alerting, and establishing clear incident response practices when things break.

• Provide technical leadership through mentorship, architecture reviews, and maintaining high technical standards across the codebase.

• Own data architecture, infrastructure, and platform improvements. Drive systems improvements and upgrades with a long-term view.

• Use systems thinking to solve problems and add capabilities. Adopt tools, technologies, and patterns to provide leverage. Build a platform, don't just get tasks done.

The experience you bring to this role:

• 7+ years of data engineering experience, with deep expertise in technologies like Snowflake, DBT, Airflow, and Python. You've architected data systems for reliability and scale, not just built pipelines to spec.

• A track record with ambiguous initiatives that required breaking down complex problems, coordinating across engineering and business teams, and delivering outcomes.

• Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to represent your team's work and direction to non-technical leadership, and to translate business needs into technical strategy that others can follow.

• Experience enabling team leverage through mentorship, establishing technical standards, and guiding stakeholders through capability tradeoffs; you make the people and systems around you better.

Bonus:

• Familiarity with healthcare data: claims, pharmacy data, interoperability specs (HL7/FHIR, X12, etc) is at the core of what we do.

Base salary range:

$190,000—$200,000 USD

We firmly believe that great candidates for this role may not meet 100% of the criteria listed in this posting. We encourage you to apply anyway - we look forward to begin getting to know you.

Benefits
For full-time employees, our compensation package includes base, equity (or a special incentive program for clinical roles) and performance bonus potential. Our benefits include physical and mental health, dental, vision, 401(k) with a match, 16 weeks parental leave for either parent, 15 days/year vacation in your first year (this increases to 20 days/year in your second year and beyond), and a supportive and inclusive culture.

Vaccination Policy

Employment with firsthand is contingent upon attesting to medical clearance requirements, which include, but may not be limited to: evidence of vaccination for/immunity to COVID-19, Hepatitis B, Influenza, MMR, Chickenpox, Tetanus and Diphtheria. All employees of firsthand are required to receive these vaccinations on a cadence/frequency as advised by the CDC, whereas not otherwise prohibited by state law.

New hires may submit for consideration a request to be exempted from these requirements (based on a valid religious or medical reason) via forms provided by firsthand. Such requests will be subject to review and approval by the Company, and exemptions will be granted only if the Company can provide a reasonable accommodation in relation to the requested exemption. Note that approvals for reasonable accommodations are reviewed and approved on a case-by-case basis and availability of a reasonable accommodation is not guaranteed.

Unfortunately, we are not able to offer sponsorship at this time.

firsthand Health will only contact candidates from email addresses ending in @firsthandcares.com. Any communication from another domain claiming to represent firsthand is fraudulent. We will never ask for payment or sensitive financial information during the hiring process. If you receive suspicious outreach, please do not respond.