Senior Data Engineer

UCLA Health is hiring a Senior Data Engineer to design and build scalable data pipelines and trusted data products that support healthcare and enterprise use cases. This onsite role in Los Angeles focuses on cloud-based lakehouse or warehouse capabilities, production engineering practices, and technical leadership across the data lifecycle.

What You Will Do

• Design and build scalable data pipelines and platforms integrating 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 solutions across clinical, operational, financial, research, and administrative healthcare data.
• Advance cloud-based data capabilities using Azure, Databricks, lakehouse architectures, enterprise data warehousing, and ML-ready data.
• Apply modern engineering practices such as 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.
• Create technical architecture artifacts including data lineage, data dictionaries, runbooks, and other documentation for reliable enterprise data operations.
• Collaborate across technology and business teams to translate complex requirements into scalable, sustainable data solutions.
• Lead technical design and architecture discussions and help define implementation and operational support approaches 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 Experience and Skills

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, backend engineering, analytics engineering, or a related technical role.
• Strong programming experience with Python, including the ability to write clean, modular, maintainable, production-quality code.
• Solid understanding of data warehousing, ETL/ELT design patterns, dimensional modeling, data lake or 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 such as Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, or similar technologies.
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP, with Microsoft Azure experience 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, feature engineering, feature stores, ML-ready datasets, MLflow, MLOps, or AI/GenAI-supporting data infrastructure including 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 the ability to explain technical decisions clearly and document solutions for long-term maintainability.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field. A master’s degree is a plus.

Technology Stack

Python, Azure, AWS, GCP, Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory, Databricks Workflows, Airflow, Git, CI/CD, MLflow, MLOps

Location and Compensation

• Location: Los Angeles, CA (onsite)
• Salary: USD 108,900 - 241,500 per year

Compensation Details

• 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 this range.