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Lead Data Engineer - Clinical AI

Palo Alto, CA

Transform healthcare with us.

At Qualified Health, we’re redefining what’s possible with Generative AI in healthcare. Our infrastructure provides the guardrails for safe AI governance, healthcare-specific agent creation, and real-time algorithm monitoring—working alongside leading health systems to drive real change.

This is more than just a job. It’s an opportunity to build the future of AI in healthcare, solve complex challenges, and make a lasting impact on patient care. If you’re ambitious, innovative, and ready to move fast, we’d love to have you on board.

Join us in shaping the future of healthcare.

 

Job Summary:

Qualified Health is seeking a Principal (Lead) Data Engineer to lead the development of our clinical intelligence layer. In this senior technical role, you'll design and build the data transformation pipelines that convert raw clinical data into AI-ready features, enabling our platform to deliver faster, more accurate clinical insights. You'll work closely with clinical SMEs to translate medical knowledge into scalable data systems, and partner with our AI team to define the data contracts that power LLM-based workflows.
This is a technical leadership role for someone who thrives on solving complex data challenges and takes pride in building reliable, production-grade systems.

Key Responsibilities:

Clinical Data Transformation (60%)

  • Design and build clinical annotation pipelines that extract conditions, medications, and procedures from unstructured clinical notes
  • Implement negation and temporal detection to distinguish current conditions from historical findings (critical for clinical decision-making)
  • Build business rules engines that classify medications, calculate risk scores, and apply clinical logic at scale
  • Integrate clinical reference data (drug databases, terminology mappings) into transformation pipelines
  • Optimize data structures to reduce LLM processing time and improve downstream AI performance

Platform Engineering (30%)

  • Build production-grade pipelines using PySpark and Databricks for large-scale clinical data processing
  • Implement data quality frameworks to validate clinical transformations and catch issues before they reach AI workflows
  • Design feature stores that serve pre-computed clinical features to ML models and LLM applications
  • Maintain pipeline observability with monitoring, alerting, and performance tracking

Collaboration (10%)

  • Partner with clinical SMEs to translate medical knowledge into data transformation logic
  • Define data contracts with AI team to ensure feature outputs meet LLM workflow requirements
  • Contribute to technical standards and best practices for clinical data engineering

Required Qualifications:

  • 8+ years of data engineering experience, with demonstrated expertise building production data pipelines
  • 5+ years on Databricks, including PySpark, Delta Lake, and Unity Catalog
  • Healthcare data experience: Prior work with FHIR APIs, EHR databases, or claims data
  • Clinical text processing experience: Built pipelines that extract entities from unstructured clinical notes using tools like spaCy, medspaCy, or cloud NLP services
  • Feature engineering for ML/AI: Experience preparing data for machine learning models or LLM consumption
  • Data quality mindset: Track record implementing validation frameworks and monitoring for data pipelines
  • Healthcare terminology: Familiarity with ICD-10, RxNorm, SNOMED CT, LOINC
  • Epic Clarity experience: Direct work with Epic's relational database structure

Desirable Skills:

  • Azure cloud platform: Hands-on with Azure Databricks, Data Lake Storage, Service Bus
  • Clinical NLP tools: Experience with Azure Text Analytics for Health, Amazon Comprehend Medical, or similar
  • RAG architecture patterns: Understanding of vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation

 

Why Join Qualified Health?

This is an opportunity to join a fast-growing company and a world-class team, that is poised to change the healthcare industry. We are a passionate, mission-driven team that is building a category-defining product. We are backed by premier investors and are looking for founding team members who are excited to do the best work of their careers.

Our employees are integral to achieving our goals so we are proud to offer competitive salaries with equity packages, robust medical/dental/vision insurance, flexible working hours, hybrid work options and an inclusive environment that fosters creativity and innovation.

Our Commitment to Diversity

Qualified Health is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace is essential to our success, and we are committed to building a team that reflects the world we live in. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital status, disability, or veteran status.

Pay & Benefits: The pay range for this role is between $160,000 and $210,000, and will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location. This role is also eligible for equity and benefits.

Join our mission to revolutionize healthcare with AI. To apply, please send your resume through the application below.

 

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