Lead Data Engineer

Breda, Netherlands | Full time | Hybrid | R1508292

We live in a world where most information is readily available at our fingertips. You might be surprised to learn the situation in hospitals is rather different. Systems used for electronic healthcare records (EHR) facilitate the clinical workflow, retrieving and storing information for each patient. There is, however, a large need for secondary usage of this data. Think of linking patients to clinical trials, medical research studies, and care quality assessment.

For this purpose IQVIA has developed a search engine enabling medical professionals to find patient cohorts and collect data. In all that we do, we have the doctors and patients at the fore of our mind, and we also ensure to strictly adhere to privacy regulations.

Patient Finder is currently used on a daily basis by 40+ hospitals in The Netherlands and Belgium and is expanding into other international markets. The product is a scale‑up within a larger corporation, meaning the product is proven while there is still room to make your own mark and propose creative solutions.

We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to drive technical direction of data pipeline and data warehouse layers bringing product robustness and maturity. You are comfortable leading work across evolving platforms and stakeholders: aligning on target patterns, ensuring continuity for users and downstream consumers, and delivering incremental improvements while keeping reliability and quality high.

You can make decisions when multiple potential approaches are identified taking into account existing codebase, reduction of operational overhead, team strengths and business priorities.

You will have the ability to mentor and coach data engineering colleagues to support their weekly responsibilities, ongoing professional development, job satisfaction and career potential.

You are a hands‑on, self‑directed individual who can bring experience in data engineering to identify incremental or substantial areas of improvement, leading on implementation with best practices.

You are a professional who is passionate about improving healthcare and having a real impact, having developed yourself as a data engineer with a software engineering background. You have an appetite to learn and develop yourself, an innate curiosity, and can bring to light clarity around abstract and unclear problems. You feel comfortable working in a self‑organizing company.

• Lead end‑to‑end design and delivery of the data platform (pipelines + warehouse layers), primarily using Prefect, Python and SQL, supported by fit‑for‑purpose design artefacts and lineage.
• Drive platform evolution by standardising patterns, reducing operational overhead, and improving maintainability and reliability across the data landscape.
• Ensure continuity and quality during change via release planning, validation strategies, risk management, and clear technical stakeholder communication.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to refine requirements, shape delivery plans, and prioritise backlog/work intake based on value, dependencies, and technical constraints
• Raise engineering standards through reviews, quality practices, and responsible AI‑assisted engineering (e.g., accelerating development and strengthening tests/refactoring under clear controls).
• Collaborate with QA to increase test maturity, coverage, and automation for pipelines and data transformations.
• Collaborate with Application and AI/ML leads to integrate data components with the wider product ecosystem (e.g., search and ML pipelines).
• Lead the data engineering team (line management where applicable), coaching engineers and owning work intake and prioritisation.

• Extensive experience with Python in a testable and scalable fashion
• History of successfully developing data pipelines (e.g. Prefect, Airflow, Luigi, Dagster)
• Hands on experience with RDBMS (Microsoft SQL or Postgre
  
  SQL preferred) and comfortable writing SQL, both DDL and DML
• Experience as lead or managing developer, or substantial experience at senior level.
• You are able to clearly explain and translate conceptual ideas and…