Zócalo Health · 17 hours ago
Principal Data Engineer
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$150K/yr - $150K/yr
5+ years expZócalo Health is a tech-enabled, community-oriented primary care organization serving historically underserved populations. The Principal Data Engineer will be responsible for designing and implementing the company's data infrastructure, building systems and pipelines to support analytics and operational visibility as the organization scales.
Hospital & Health Care
Responsibilities
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
Qualification
Required
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
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
Benefits
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.
Company
Zócalo Health
Now serving patients in California, Texas, Washington, and Maryland (July 2025)! Introducing Zócalo Health, a primary care and care management service specializing in culturally-sensitive care for the Latino community.
51-200 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageLeadership Team
Erik Cardenas
Co-Founder & CEO
Tom Valdivia, MD, MS
Executive Advisor to the CEO
Company data provided by crunchbase