Principal Data Engineer

Principal Data Engineerat Zócalo HealthRemote (Full Time) Compensation: $150,000 (per year)About Us Zócalo Health is a tech-enabled, community-oriented primary care organization serving people who have historically been underserved by the one-size-fits-all healthcare system. We partner with health plans, providers, and community organizations to deliver culturally competent primary care, behavioral health, and social care.Our model is built for populations with high medical and social complexity, where fragmented care drives poor outcomes and unnecessary cost. We combine local, community-based teams with virtual care and modern technology to deliver coordinated, whole-person care where members live and receive support.Founded in 2021, Zócalo Health is backed by leading healthcare and mission-aligned investors and is scaling rapidly across states and populations. We are building a durable care platform designed to perform in constrained healthcare environments and to lead the shift toward accountable, value-based care.Role Description The Principal Data Engineer will join Zócalo Health at a defining moment for the company. As we scale across markets and value-based care arrangements, we are investing in the data platform required to operate reliably, measure outcomes, and support product and care delivery at scale. Today, core pieces of that data foundation do not yet exist. This role exists to build them.You will own the design and implementation of Zócalo Health’s data infrastructure. You will build the underlying systems, pipelines, and data models that enable analytics, product measurement, and operational visibility across the company.Your work will support near-term needs such as business and operational visibility, but the primary focus of this role is establishing a scalable, durable data platform. This includes laying the groundwork for longer-term initiatives such as the longitudinal patient record, population-level analytics, and product instrumentation. You will partner closely with Engineering and Product to ensure the data platform supports roadmap priorities and outcome measurement as the company grows.In your first 12 months, you will:Design and launch our first production-grade data warehouseImplement reliable ingestion from core clinical and operational systemsEstablish data quality and monitoring standards used across engineeringEnable company-wide metrics for care outcomes and operationsThis position reports to the VP, Engineering and partners closely with Product, Clinical, Operations, and Finance leaders.The Data Engineer will contribute in the following ways:Own the end-to-end design of Zócalo Health’s data platform, including warehouse, lake, and ingestion architectureBuild and operate production data pipelines across clinical, operational, and third-party systems (APIs, CDC, events)Define core analytical and longitudinal data models used across the companyBuild robust data ingestion frameworks, including Change Data Capture (CDC), API-based ingestion, and event or webhook-driven pipelinesImplement testing, monitoring, and observability practices to ensure data quality, pipeline reliability, and system performanceApply strong engineering fundamentals to improve scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency of data systemsPartner with Product to ensure data systems support metric definitions, outcome measurement, and roadmap prioritizationCore Technologies (current and planned):Cloud: GCP/AWS Data warehouse: SnowflakeOrchestration: Airflow Transformations: dbtIngestion: Fivetran Languages: SQL, Python Qualifications5+ years of experience in data engineering or backend engineering roles with significant data platform responsibilityProven experience designing and building data infrastructure, pipelines, and data models from the ground upStrong computer science fundamentals, including comfort reasoning about distributed systems and data processing at scaleHands-on experience with modern data platforms and tooling, including SQL-based transformation workflowsExperience building and operating production-grade data pipelinesAbility to diagnose and resolve performance, reliability, and data quality issues in complex systemsStrong ownership mindset and comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-growing environmentsClear communicator able to partner effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholdersPreferred QualificationsExperience working with healthcare, care delivery, or other regulated data environmentsFamiliarity with HIPAA requirements and handling of sensitive health or customer dataExperience building streaming data pipelines or event-driven architecturesExperience implementing data observability, lineage, or quality monitoring toolsExperience building dashboards or analytical outputs used by executives and frontline teamsFamiliarity with AI-assisted development tools and automation in engineering workflowsEarly stage startup experience strongly preferred What you can expect fro