Design, build, and maintain data pipelines, optimize performance and cost-efficiency, extend capabilities, and collaborate across teams to improve data governance and quality.
Join Our Mission to Revolutionize Healthcare
Thoughtful is pioneering a new approach to automation for all healthcare providers! Our AI-powered Revenue Cycle Automation platform enables the healthcare industry to automate and improve its core business operations.
We're looking for Staff Data Engineers to help scale and strengthen our data platform.
Our data stack today consists of Aurora RDS, AWS Glue, Apache Iceberg, S3 (Parquet), Spark and Athena - supporting a range of use cases from operational reporting to downstream services. We’re looking to grow the team with engineers who can help improve performance, increase reliability, and expand the platform's capabilities as our data volume and complexity continue to grow.
You’ll work closely with other engineers to evolve our existing pipelines, improve observability and data quality, and enable faster, more flexible access to data across the company. The platform is deployed on AWS using OpenTofu, and we’re looking for engineers who bring strong cloud infrastructure fundamentals alongside deep experience in data engineering.
Your Role:
- Build: Develop and maintain data pipelines and transformations across the stack. Starting from ingesting transactional data into the data lakehouse to refining data up the medallion data architecture.
- Optimize: Tune performance, storage layout, and cost-efficiency across our data storage and query engines.
- Extend: Help design and implement new data ingestion patterns and improve platform observability and reliability.
- Collaborate: Partner with engineering, product, and operations teams to deliver well-structured, trustworthy data for diverse use cases.
- Contribute: Help establish and evolve best practices for our data infrastructure, from pipeline design to OpenTofu-managed resource provisioning.
- Secure: Help design and implement a data governance strategy to secure our data lakehouse.
Your Qualifications:
- 8-10+ years of experience building and maintaining data pipelines in production environments
- Strong knowledge of the data lakehouse ecosystem, with an emphasis on AWS data services - particularly Glue, S3, Athena/Trino/PrestoDB, and Aurora
- Proficiency in Python, Spark and Athena/Trino/PrestoDB for data transformation and orchestration
- Experience managing infrastructure with OpenTofu/Terraform or other Infrastructure-as-Code tools
- Solid understanding of data modeling, partitioning strategies, schema evolution, and performance tuning
- Comfortable working with cloud-native data pipelines and batch processing (streaming experience is a plus but not required)
What Sets You Apart:
- Systems thinker - you understand the tradeoffs in data architecture and design for long-term stability and clarity
- Outcome-driven - you focus on building useful, maintainable systems that serve real business needs
- Strong collaborator - you're comfortable working across teams and surfacing data requirements early
- Practical and hands-on - able to dive into logs, schemas, and IAM policies when needed
- Thoughtful contributor - committed to improving code quality, developer experience, and documentation across the board
Why Thoughtful?
- Competitive compensation
- Equity participation: Employee Stock Options.
- Health benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance.
- Time off: Generous leave policies and paid company holidays.
California Salary Range
$190,000—$250,000 USD
Top Skills
Apache Iceberg
Athena
Aurora Rds
Aws Glue
Opentofu
Parquet
S3
Spark
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