Staff Data Engineer

About Wellth:

Wellth is a fast-growing digital health startup headquartered in Los Angeles that recently raised a Series B from leading investors including SignalFire. Our mission is to provide daily care motivation to people living with chronic conditions so they can make healthier choices, every single day.

We don’t assume that just providing a tool or a beautiful app will actually get results. We use behavioral economics, habit science, and technology to motivate and sustain behavior change in some of the highest need and most underserved populations in the US (think Medicaid and Medicare), drastically changing their quality of life and health outcomes. We have demonstrated results with several large insurers and health systems (e.g. reducing hospitalizations by over 40%), and are scaling the company and team. Our goal is to be the category leader in improving health outcomes for hard to engage populations, a $50B+ annual opportunity in healthcare.

Our work quite literally saves lives every day. We’ve engaged 65,000+ members, prevented 15k+ hospital days and saved 500+ lives. We are a mission-driven company where you work with incredible talent and see tangible differences directly from your impact and influence.

About the Role:

As a Staff Data Engineer, you will design and implement scalable systems that process and standardize healthcare data, enabling advanced analytics and predictive modeling to support Wellth’s mission of driving daily healthy habits. You’ll lead the creation of foundational data layers, ensuring high data quality, accessibility, and consistency, while collaborating across teams to align data strategies with business objectives. This role offers the opportunity to work with diverse datasets such as claims, EHRs, and lab data, shaping scalable solutions that solve mission-critical problems.

We’re looking for a seasoned data engineering professional with extensive healthcare experience, expertise in building robust data systems, and proficiency in tools like SQL, Python, DBT, and orchestration frameworks. You’ll thrive in this role if you’re passionate about solving complex challenges, mentoring engineers, and driving innovation in a collaborative, dynamic environment.

The core opportunities in this position include:

• Leading the design and implementation of scalable data pipelines to ingest, clean, and standardize healthcare data for analytics and predictive modeling.
• Creating foundational data layers that enable analytics engineers to efficiently build models and generate insights.
• Seeking, processing, and managing new data sources, such as claims data, EHRs, and lab data, to enrich Wellth’s analytical capabilities.
• Ensuring high data quality, consistency, and accessibility by implementing rigorous validation and monitoring systems.
• Owning and evolving data schemas, data dictionaries, and governance structures to support reliable and scalable data use across teams.
• Proactively monitoring and addressing operational issues, implementing preventive measures to minimize disruptions.
• Collaborate with senior leaders in engineering, product, and customer success to define the data strategy that supports their objectives

Specifically, you will:

• Develop and maintain a codebase for Wellth’s data analysis and visualization package, focusing on healthcare outcomes. 
• Build durable self-service data tools operating on health data that support product insights for our customers.
• Triage operational issues, address data bugs, and create and maintain documentation.
• Optimize and experiment with new and existing business-critical data models.
• Seek, make available, and consume new data sets, including but not limited to healthcare data standard sets (e.g. claims data, clinical information, EHR data)
• Serve as a thought partner to our Product Managers and Product leadership team. Educate our teams to help us ask better questions, interpret findings more effectively, and drive informed decision-making.
• Provide leadership on industry best practices, trending topics, and emergent technologies to continuously improve and refine our processes and systems.

Some of the problems you’ll work on include:

• Architect and implement scalable analytics to demonstrate customer outcomes.
• Identify high-risk patients that are likely to gain significant benefit from Wellth programs.
• Develop and enhance propensity score models for generating synthetic control groups.
• Build and evolve predictive models: churn, health improvement, disease progression, behavioral improvement, and more.
• Investigate potential expansion/impact areas not yet addressed by Wellth’s solutions.
• Tell a powerful story about the impact of Wellth’s positive behavior change through data and data visualizations for health plan and provider customers.

Some of the people you will work with:

• Product leaders on building out a scalable healthcare outcomes analytics product.
• Customer success leaders to deliver evidence of Wellth’s outcomes.
• Data engineers, analysts, and data operators to establish and maintain best practices in engineering and data operations. 
• Manager of Data Engineering, focusing on your professional growth in data science and leadership within the healthcare outcomes domain.

We’re looking for someone who has:

Healthcare experience

• 7+ years of professional experience as an analytics engineer or data analyst in the healthcare sector, with hands-on experience with sensitive claims data, patient data, and other healthcare data sets.
• Experience developing analyses offering strategic insights on quality metrics, CMS measures, and ROI.
• Expert familiarity with healthcare data standards and experience working with various healthcare data sets (claims, EHR, clinical, labs, etc.).
• Experience working with HEDIS measure reporting and a familiarity with Star Ratings in Medicare Advantage
• Fluency in evolving healthcare industry standards, analytics techniques, and best practices, applying them to analytical methods that drive more meaningful insights.

Analytics Engineering Skills

• Experience with architecting and operating production data systems: responding to and triaging issues, optimizing performance, and increasing stability, among other things.
• Advanced proficiency in writing clean and maintainable SQL, Python, and shell scripts for automation, analysis, and ETL using industry best practices.
• Proven ability to design and implement advanced, customer-facing data visualizations. 
• Proficiency in developing, executing, and maintaining dbt models.
• Experience working on software development teams, including proficiency with Git for collaborating via pull/merge requests and knowledge of agile and scrum methodologies.
• Proficiency in analyzing and using database schemas and data dictionaries.
• Knowledge of Redshift, BigQuery, and other data warehouse infrastructure.
• Knowledge of orchestration frameworks such as Airflow, Fivetran, or Flyte.

Senior-level ownership skills

• A consistent track record of solving ambiguous and highly complex technical problems with reliable delivery of their solutions.
• Comfort with autonomy in the face of ambiguous problems, delivering independently and in a team environment.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to present complex data in an accessible way. 

We expect our candidates can:

• Be an owner of large vertical and horizontal system concerns from inception, to launch, to post-launch operations. 
• Be a strong communicator with engineers, other cross-functional roles, and leadership. Written or verbal, your communications are timely, concise, and clear.
• Be pragmatic, balancing quality, speed, cost, and theory. Operate with autonomy and influence without authority.
• Teach, coach, and mentor other engineers, being a force multiplier for the team.
• Compliment the work culture that supports team members, encourages curiosity and learning, and takes advantage of opportunities to improve systems and processes

In addition to the above, our ideal candidate has:

• Familiarity with data orchestration technologies like Airflow, Dagster, or Fivetran
• Experience using at least one data quality or observability tool, such as dbt tests, Great Expectations, or Metaplane.
• Experience working with Jupyter, Spark, and other data research technologies.
• Deep data security knowledge to protect highly confidential and sensitive data, especially in the healthcare industry.

Base Compensation: $170-205k

Benefits at Wellth of working with us include:

• Flexible working arrangements, supporting strong remote-first practices and tools with the option to work in our excellent gathering space in Marina Del Rey.
• Robust paid time off and generous parental leave program.
• Competitive salary & commission structure.
• Health, dental, vision insurance, and FSA/HSA plans.
• Ability to have a positive impact on people who need it most.
• Support of a highly dedicated team focused on building the future of healthcare.

Wellth is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other protected characteristics.