UCLA Health is seeking an experienced Senior Data Engineer to design and build scalable data pipelines and trusted data products that support healthcare and enterprise analytics, data science, machine learning, and AI use cases.
Location and Role Details
Location: Los Angeles, CA (onsite)
Salary: USD 108,900 - 241,500 per year
Experience: 5+ years
Responsibilities
- Design and build scalable data pipelines and platforms to integrate complex enterprise and external data sources.
- Develop trusted data products, curated datasets, and reusable data models for reporting, analytics, data science, machine learning, and AI.
- Engineer data solutions across clinical, operational, financial, research, and administrative healthcare domains.
- Advance cloud-based data capabilities using Azure, Databricks, lakehouse architectures, enterprise data warehousing, and ML-ready data.
- Apply modern engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, orchestration, monitoring, observability, and production support.
- Optimize data solutions for performance, scalability, reliability, security, and usability.
- Establish standards and reusable frameworks for data modeling, metadata, governance, data quality, security, and engineering.
- Produce technical architecture and operational documentation such as data lineage, data dictionaries, runbooks, and other materials that enable reliable enterprise data operations.
- Partner with technology and business teams to translate complex requirements into scalable and sustainable data solutions.
- Lead technical design and architecture discussions and support definition of implementation approaches and operational support for strategic initiatives.
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, workshops, and knowledge sharing.
- Partner with leadership to shape engineering standards, platform capabilities, and the long-term data architecture roadmap.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, backend engineering, analytics engineering, or a related technical role.
- Strong programming experience with Python, including clean, modular, maintainable, production-quality code.
- Solid understanding of data warehousing, ETL/ELT design patterns, dimensional modeling, data lake/lakehouse concepts, and large-scale data processing.
- Experience designing and building data pipelines that ingest, transform, validate, and publish data from multiple source systems.
- Experience with modern data platforms including Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, or similar technologies.
- Working knowledge of cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP; Microsoft Azure experience is especially valuable.
- Experience with orchestration and pipeline execution tools such as Azure Data Factory, Databricks Workflows, Airflow, or similar platforms.
- Experience with production engineering practices including Git-based development, CI/CD, automated testing, code reviews, logging, monitoring, and release management.
- Experience with machine learning data workflows, including feature engineering, feature stores, ML-ready datasets, MLflow, MLOps, and AI/GenAI-supporting data infrastructure such as RAG-based systems.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including architects, analysts, data scientists, product managers, business teams, and application owners.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including explaining technical decisions and documenting solutions for long-term maintainability.
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field.
- A master’s degree is a plus.
Technologies
Python, Azure, AWS, GCP, Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory, Databricks Workflows, Airflow, Git, CI/CD, MLflow, MLOps
Compensation and Salary Notes
- Salary Range: $108,900.00 - $241,500.00 annually
- Salary offers are based on qualifications, experience, and internal equity. The University anticipates offering a salary between the minimum and midpoint of the range.
