Lead Data Engineer

The role and your profile

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.
• Ability to clearly explain and translate conceptual ideas and technical rationale to technical and non‑technical colleagues.
• Worked as part of teams consisting of 4 or more developers and are used to having your ideas challenged and providing constructive criticism to others.
• Ability to autonomously make architecture and design decisions as lead.
• Demonstrated use of automation and AI‑assisted development tools to improve engineering outcomes (quality, speed, test coverage, maintainability) in a controlled and secure way.
• Experience with Dev Ops workflows, especially CI/CD.
• Good interpersonal communication and presentation skills.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.
• Based in Europe, ideally commutable to Amsterdam, Netherlands.

• Knowledge of medical data standards such as FHIR based data exchange and/or OMOP.
• Exposure to healthcare, life sciences, clinical trials or pharmaceutical data.
• Master Data Management of ideally medical ontologies.
• Dutch language skills are a plus for local collaboration and accessing local data sources.
• Opportunity to be part of innovation in the medical field, contributing to improved outcomes for…