Lead Data Engineer - Healthcare Data & Audience Applications

The role

You will design and build healthcare-focused applications and data systems for audience intelligence, activation, measurement and reporting across HCP and DTC workflows. This is a hands-on technical leadership role that leads architecture and execution in regulated environments.

What you will do

• Define and maintain the healthcare data architecture, interface contracts, ADRs, schemas and staged delivery plan.
• Lead ingestion and transformation patterns across Snowflake, Athena/S3, MySQL and approved healthcare stores.
• Partner with Data Cloud on source certification, partner-feed contracts, identity validation and data availability SLAs.
• Design healthcare base/vertical models and governed views with access controls, masking and versioning.
• Set SLOs and operational readiness criteria, including dashboards, alerts, runbooks and rollback paths.
• Lead design and code reviews, mentor the Senior Data Engineer and coordinate dependencies across the pod.
• Support compliance evidence, annual audits, US data-residency controls and stoplight decisions.
• Apply privacy-by-design principles across all systems handling PHI/PII.
• Partner with Product and Data teams to translate healthcare requirements into scalable architectures.
• Drive engineering best practices across testing, CI/CD, code quality and operational excellence.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of data engineering experience with increasing technical ownership.
• Expert SQL and strong Python and Java.
• Experience with batch and streaming patterns, orchestration, testing and schema evolution.
• Experience designing distributed systems, including microservices and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with streaming and batch processing tools such as Kafka, Spark, Flink or similar.
• Backend development in Python, Java or Ruby, and API design using REST or gRPC.
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow.
• Experience with data warehouses and lakehouse platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks or similar.
• Strong experience with AWS, GCP or Azure and infrastructure as code.
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience implementing observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and reliability patterns.
• Experience building and scaling data-intensive or distributed systems.

Nice to have

• Experience with healthcare data providers or identity ecosystems.
• Background in AdTech, MarTech or audience/data platforms.
• Experience with privacy-enhancing technologies such as tokenization and clean rooms.
• Exposure to ML/AI-driven data products or analytics systems.
• Healthcare experience in regulated environments is strongly preferred.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO.
• Medical, dental and vision coverage.
• Employee equity.
• Employee discounts.
• Virtual wellness classes.
• Pet insurance.

Before you apply

• Hiring involves compliance with CERT and HIPAA rules and US data-residency controls.

About the company

Zeta Global is an AI-powered marketing cloud that uses artificial intelligence and consumer signals to help marketers acquire, grow and retain customers. It was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in New York City.