Director of Data

Opala develops healthcare products that tackle the most complex data challenges faced by payers and providers. As a startup originating from a major healthcare plan in the Northwest, we combine deep health-tech expertise with top-tier data and software engineering talent to create products that our customers find meaningful and valuable. These data products empower payers and their partners to find timely insights and take action to intervene in areas like value-based care analytics, interoperability compliance, and real-time streaming of clinical data.

In this remote position, we're seeking an exceptional Director of Data to lead our data organization and drive the technical execution of our data strategy. This role requires a unique combination of deep healthcare domain expertise, advanced technical skills across the data stack, and proven leadership experience. You'll be responsible for building and scaling our data infrastructure that connects complex healthcare payer and provider systems, creating unified patient records that power our product offerings.

As a key member of our leadership team, you'll partner directly with our CTO to define and execute our data strategy, ensuring our product roadmap is supported by robust, compliant, and scalable data solutions. This is a high-impact role in a growing startup where your technical expertise and strategic thinking will directly contribute to our success.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Design and implement scalable data architectures that integrate healthcare payer data, health exchange data, and provider systems / EMR data into unified golden records
• Lead the technical strategy for mapping diverse healthcare data sources to industry standards like HL7’s FHIR, ensuring interoperability and exchange
• Architect, implement and optimize data pipelines using modern patterns within batch and real-time data integrations to our data APIs and our customer + partner data platforms
• Drive technical decisions around our Databricks implementation, optimizing for development velocity, cost efficiency, and operational excellence
• Establish data governance frameworks and operationalize data quality, lineage, and documentation
• Guide modern and legacy data integration capabilities from SFTP, to Delta Sharing, to EMR integrations

• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers, analysts, and QA engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning
• Recruit, hire, and develop top-tier data talent with healthcare domain expertise
• Collaborate closely with product, engineering, and operations teams to ensure data solutions align with our objectives
• Establish engineering processes, code review standards, and quality assurance practices for the data team

• Partner with the CTO on long-term data strategy and technology roadmap planning
• Collaborate with product leadership to ensure our data strategy supports and accelerates our product strategy
• Drive data-informed decision making across the organization – and our customers
  -through robust analytics and reporting

Healthcare Domain Expertise

• 5+ years of experience in healthcare data, with deep understanding of payer and provider data ecosystems
• Extensive experience with healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7, X12) and clinical data formats
• Proven track record of working with EMR systems, claims data, and clinical workflows
• Strong understanding of healthcare regulatory landscape (HIPAA, HITECH, FDA, CMS requirements)

Technical Expertise

• Advanced proficiency in data architecture, data engineering, and data science methodologies
• Expert-level experience with Databricks, including optimization for cost and performance
• Strong background in pub/sub architectures, batch processing, and real-time data integration in the healthcare ecosystem
• Proficiency in modern data stack technologies (Python, SQL, Spark, Kafka, etc.)
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP) and infrastructure as code
• Familiarity with emerging technologies within AI/ML

Leadership & Communication

• 3+ years of experience leading technical teams, preferably in…