Principal Data Engineer

Principal Data Engineer

at Zócalo Health

Remote (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 warehouse
• Implement reliable ingestion from core clinical and operational systems
• Establish data quality and monitoring standards used across engineering
• Enable company-wide metrics for care outcomes and operations

This 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 architecture
• Build 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 company
• Build robust data ingestion frameworks, including Change Data Capture (CDC), API-based ingestion, and event or webhook-driven pipelines
• Implement testing, monitoring, and observability practices to ensure data quality, pipeline reliability, and system performance
• Apply strong engineering fundamentals to improve scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency of data systems
• Partner with Product to ensure data systems support metric definitions, outcome measurement, and roadmap prioritization
• Core Technologies (current and planned):
• Cloud: GCP/AWS
• Data warehouse: Snowflake
• Orchestration: Airflow
• Transformations: dbt
• Ingestion: Fivetran
• Languages: SQL, Python

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering or backend engineering roles with significant data platform responsibility
• Proven experience designing and building data infrastructure, pipelines, and data models from the ground up
• Strong computer science fundamentals, including comfort reasoning about distributed systems and data processing at scale
• Hands-on experience with modern data platforms and tooling, including SQL-based transformation workflows
• Experience building and operating production-grade data pipelines
• Ability to diagnose and resolve performance, reliability, and data quality issues in complex systems
• Strong ownership mindset and comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-growing environments
• Clear communicator able to partner effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with healthcare, care delivery, or other regulated data environments

• Familiarity with HIPAA requirements and handling of sensitive health or customer data
• Experience building streaming data pipelines or event-driven architectures
• Experience implementing data observability, lineage, or quality monitoring tools
• Experience building dashboards or analytical outputs used by executives and frontline teams
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and automation in engineering workflows
• Early stage startup experience strongly preferred

What you can expect from Zócalo Health

• Equity compensation package
• Comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, and vision
• 401k
• Flexible PTO policy - take the time you need to recharge
• $1,000 home office stipend
• We provide the equipment needed for this role.
• Opportunity for rapid career progression with plenty of room for personal growth.

You must be authorized to work in the United States. Remote Work can be done from anywhere in the U.S.

At Zócalo Health Inc., we see diversity and inclusion as a source of strength in transforming healthcare. We believe building trust and innovation are best achieved through diverse perspectives. To us, acceptance and respect are rooted in an understanding that people do not experience things in the same way, including our healthcare system. Individuals seeking employment at Zócalo Health are considered without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. 

Those seeking employment at Zócalo Health are considered without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.