Vice President of Data Engineering - Hospital Systems

Vice President of Data Engineering

The company | Full-Time | Senior Leadership

About the Role

The company is seeking a VP of Data Engineering to lead the company's execution of hospital data acquisition and clinical data operations. This role owns the day-to-day and quarter-to-quarter work of getting the company into hospital environments, securing compliant access to clinical data — including sensitive information like physician notes — and standing up the pipelines and processes that turn that access into usable data.

This is a hands-on operating leadership role. The VP of Data Engineering reports to the Chief Business Officer, translating company-level strategy into concrete hospital relationships, integration projects, and delivery timelines — running point on individual hospital relationships, managing the technical integration work, and ensuring every engagement is executed compliantly and securely.

This is an individual contributor role today, with the opportunity to build and lead a team as the function grows. The VP of Data Engineering will personally drive execution across every workstream — hospital relationships, infrastructure, contracting, coding, and data processing — while establishing the foundation for that team.

The ideal candidate has done this work before inside an EMR-adjacent or health-data organization and knows firsthand what it takes to earn a hospital's trust, get through their compliance and legal review, and stand up a durable data pipeline afterward.

What You'll Own

Hospital Relationship Execution

• Serve as the company's primary point of contact for assigned hospital and health system partners — IT leadership, compliance/privacy officers, and operational stakeholders.

• Lead individual data access negotiations from first conversation through signed agreement and live data flow, in partnership with legal.

• Maintain and grow existing hospital relationships to expand data scope and depth (e.g., moving from structured data to physician notes and other unstructured clinical documentation).

• Act as the credible, trusted operator hospitals rely on to deliver on commitments made at the strategic level.

Data Acquisition & Integration

• Run the end-to-end implementation of data connections to hospital and health system partners, using simple, secure, file-based data transfer methods.

• Determine and execute the right technical pathway for each partner — secure file transfer (e.g., encrypted file drop), on-site/honest-broker processing, de-identification pipelines — based on that institution's systems and constraints including governance and legal agreements.

• Manage integration project timelines, technical troubleshooting, and coordination between the company's engineering team and hospital IT teams.

Infrastructure

• Own infrastructure across both the Trusted Research Environment (TRE) and NewCo environments.

• Understand and manage cloud deployments, and apply sound information-security judgment when handling PHI in the TRE and NewCo environments (e.g., ensuring PHI never leaves the environment to a local device). Partner with a fractional security officer on day-to-day security practices.

• Write and maintain Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to provision and manage infrastructure.

Compliance & Secure Data Handling

• Ensure every implementation meets HIPAA, HITECH, applicable state privacy law, and the specific data governance requirements of each partner hospital.

• Review contracts and statements of work (SOWs) directly, in partnership with legal, to make sure agreed terms are technically workable before implementation begins.

• Operationalize data use agreements and BAAs — ensuring technical implementation matches what was contractually agreed.

• Apply and enforce the company's data handling standards (encryption, access controls, audit logging, minimum necessary, de-identification protocols) on every project.

• Flag and escalate compliance or security risk before it becomes a partner-facing or regulatory issue.

Data Operations & Delivery

• Write the code and perform the data processing needed to ingest, normalize, and validate incoming clinical data from each hospital source.

• Identify and resolve data quality, mapping, and structural issues unique to each hospital's EMR configuration.

• Write inclusion/exclusion (I/E) criteria specifications and translate them into SQL to run feasibility queries and patient counts within partner environments.

• Support downstream data mining and utilization efforts by ensuring unstructured data (e.g., physician notes) is captured, applying an understanding of text extraction technologies (OCR, NLP-based entity and information extraction) to convert it into a form the broader team can work with.

Process & Team Building

• Operate as a hands-on individual contributor across hospital implementation, integration engineering, and account management, with the opportunity to build and lead a team as the company scales — including roles such as a clinical informatics specialist, a data engineer, and a cloud engineer.

• Develop repeatable playbooks and processes so each new hospital implementation gets faster, more predictable, and lower-risk over time.

• Report implementation status, risks, and pipeline health to the Chief Business Officer and executive leadership on a regular cadence.

What You Bring

• 7+ years in health data, clinical informatics, EMR/health IT, or health data interoperability, including experience leading implementation, integration, or account/relationship teams.

• Direct, hands-on experience getting hospitals live on a data-sharing or integration project — from first contact through signed agreement to production data flow.

• Strong relationship-building skills with hospital IT, compliance, and operational stakeholders — comfortable being the steady, trusted operator a hospital deals with day to day.

• Solid working knowledge of HIPAA, PHI handling, data use agreements, and BAAs, and how those translate into technical implementation requirements. Comfortable reviewing contracts and SOWs directly, in partnership with legal.

• Comfort with simple, secure file-based data transfer methods; deep experience with EHR interoperability standards (HL7, FHIR, CCDA) is not required.

• Comfort with infrastructure: cloud deployments and Terraform-based infrastructure-as-code, across both a TRE and a standalone (NewCo) environment, along with the ability to support day-to-day security practices.

• Hands-on coding ability (e.g., SQL for feasibility queries, Python for data processing).

• Experience handling unstructured clinical data (e.g., physician notes) as part of an implementation is a strong plus, including an understanding of text extraction technologies (OCR, NLP-based entity and information extraction) used in data mining.

• Prior experience at an EMR-adjacent company, health data spinout, HIE, CRO, or similar organization is a plus — experience similar to implementation or delivery leadership roles at similar organizations fits well.

• Entrepreneurial mindset — comfortable operating as a hands-on individual contributor today, with the drive to build and eventually lead a team as the function grows.

Why This Role Matters

Every hospital relationship the company builds and every data pipeline it stands up runs through this role. The VP of Implementation is what turns the company's data strategy into actual, compliant, flowing clinical data — this is the execution engine behind the company's most critical asset.

More About Us

At our company, you’ll thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced startup environment where innovation and impact happen daily. Our hybrid work model blends the flexibility of remote work with the energy of in-person collaboration. We foster an inclusive, team-driven culture where every voice matters, ideas are valued, and opportunities for growth and advancement are built into our DNA.

Join us and be rewarded with a competitive compensation package that includes salary and equity, giving you a stake in our shared success. Beyond the numbers, you’ll have the rare opportunity to make a direct, visible impact in a mission-driven organization at the forefront of life sciences innovation, where your work contributes to breakthroughs that can transform patient care and advance the future of precision medicine.

The salary range for this position is $297,000–$367,000 annually, representing a good-faith estimate of what we reasonably expect to pay for this role. Actual compensation will depend on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. This range does not include bonus, equity, or benefits. This role is eligible for the following benefits: medical, vision, dental, 401(k).