Lead Data Engineering

Job Title: Lead Data Engineering

Work Mode: Remote with PST, travel as needed, to Orange County, CA 20-30%

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior Data Engineering Lead to drive enterprise data platform architecture, lead data engineering initiatives, and mentor a growing team of engineers. This role combines strategic leadership with deep technical expertise in modern cloud data platforms, particularly the Azure ecosystem and Databricks Lakehouse architecture.

The ideal candidate will take ownership of data engineering standards, governance frameworks, and scalable data solutions while ensuring high data quality, security, performance, and regulatory compliance aligned with healthcare industry standards.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Mentoring

• Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing data engineering team.
• Provide technical guidance, architectural oversight, and code reviews.
• Establish engineering best practices, standards, and governance frameworks.
• Foster collaboration across engineering, analytics, BI, and business teams.
• Drive knowledge sharing, technical upskilling, and continuous improvement.

Data Platform Architecture & Engineering

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable data pipelines across cloud and hybrid environments.
• Architect modern lakehouse/data warehouse solutions using Azure and Databricks.
• Develop robust ETL/ELT frameworks ensuring reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Lead integration of data from enterprise systems, SaaS platforms, APIs, and on-premises sources.
• Define data models optimized for analytics, reporting, and advanced analytics use cases.

Data Governance, Security & Quality

• Implement enterprise-grade data governance using Databricks Unity Catalog.
• Establish data lineage, access controls, metadata management, and security policies.
• Ensure compliance with healthcare security and regulatory standards where applicable.
• Build data quality monitoring, observability, and reliability frameworks.

Strategy & Stakeholder Engagement

• Develop long-term data platform strategy aligned with organizational goals.
• Drive cloud data modernization and optimization initiatives.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable solutions.
• Support BI and analytics teams with governed, high-quality datasets.

Mandatory Technical Requirements

• Strong hands-on experience with:

• Azure Data Factory
• Azure Data Lake Storage
• Azure Databricks
• Azure Synapse Analytics

• Proven experience designing enterprise-scale data pipelines and lakehouse architectures.
• Mandatory expertise in Databricks Unity Catalog, including governance implementation, lineage tracking, access control policies, and metadata management.
• Strong experience in ETL/ELT development, data warehousing, and dimensional data modeling.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, Spark, JSON, and modern data engineering frameworks.
• Experience integrating enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, and healthcare/SaaS platforms where applicable.
• Solid understanding of data governance, security protocols, RBAC, data lineage, and data quality practices.
• Experience working in Agile environments with DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and version control tools (Git, Jenkins, Jira).