Senior Data Platform Engineer

About The Role

This is a newly created role, and one of the first two engineering hires NikoHealth has made in the United States. You'll report directly to the CTO and own how data gets into our platform, out of it, and between the databases underneath it.

Almost everything hard about bringing on a new customer is a data problem. Getting years of patient, order, and billing history out of a competitor's system and into ours currently runs on hand-run scripts, CSVs on a shared drive, and transform logic that lives outside version control. There's no CI on it, no dry run, and no safe way to re-run a failed load. Every migration adds weeks to an onboarding.

Your first job is to turn that into a tested, repeatable pipeline, and then make how long onboarding takes a number we can actually report. It's the single clearest path we have to landing revenue we've already signed.

The scope is the databases themselves and everything that moves data in and out of them. It's deliberately focused: this is the constraint on how fast we can bring customers live, and we'd rather you fix it properly than spread across everything.

What you'll do in the first 6 months

• Get the migration pipeline into version control and under CI, with a dry-run mode and re-runs that don't corrupt anything.
• Publish our import contract, so onboarding teams and customers both know what good input looks like before anyone starts.
• Put a real measurement on onboarding time-to-live, reported separately for enterprise and small business. We can't currently tell a prospect how long it takes.
• Own database configuration, backup, and restore across the fleet, and prove a restore actually works.
• Plan the consolidation of our two database engines. Every customer runs both MySQL and PostgreSQL side by side with a live bridge between them, and untangling that is yours to scope, sequence, and execute.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years in data engineering, data platform, or a closely related role.
• Strong SQL, including performance work on large tables, against PostgreSQL or MySQL. You'd work in both.
• Production ingestion pipelines you built and operated, where idempotency and safe re-runs were a design concern rather than an afterthought.
• Experience migrating customer data between systems where the source was messy and the customer was watching.
• Python, C# to the level where you own the transform layer outright.
• Daily working use of AI coding agents such as Cursor or Claude Code, including the harness around them: tests, project instructions, and a loop you can run again.

Nice to have

• dbt, or a strong opinion about what the ETL layer should look like.
• Healthcare claims formats, particularly X12 837 and 835.
• A MySQL to PostgreSQL consolidation you've actually done.
  
  We're not asking for HL7 or FHIR. If you have it, great, but it isn't what this job needs.

How we work

We're honest about what this is. The current state is rough and needs dedicated investment. Some of the tooling was built as a workaround years ago and quietly became permanent. We're also genuinely mid-decision on real things and we'd rather hire someone who helps make those calls than pretend they're already made.

We work with AI agents, seriously. The team works agentically and so will you. What matters is what you do after the agent produces something: tests, linters, project instructions, a loop you can run again. If your answer to a bad result is a longer prompt, we're probably not a fit.

Most application development is done by a long-standing engineering partner. Some data work runs through them today as ticketed requests, and part of the point of this role is that it stops having to.

No layers, and no new bottlenecks. You'd be one of the first two engineering employees here, reporting to the CTO. Nobody sits between you and the person who decides. In return, we'd ask that what you build outlives you being on call for it: automation only its author understands is a different dependency, not a fix for the first one. Everyone here is remote, and we'd like your hours to overlap the US East Coast.

This is the start of the engineering team, not the end of it. We're hiring more engineers through 2027. The people who join first get the widest scope, the most say in how the team gets built, and first choice about what they own as it grows.

How to apply

Apply through the link on this page. Instead of a cover letter, we ask one question: tell us about the messiest data migration you've run, and what you'd do differently. A few sentences is plenty.

Use AI to help write your application if you want to, we do too. We read every one ourselves, and we can tell when nobody read the posting.

Your first conversation will be with our CTO, who is the hiring manager and will walk you through the rest of the process.

Compensation and benefits

• The range shown for this role is base salary, and does not include equity or bonus. We post it because we expect to pay inside it.
• Equity in the company.
• Medical / dental / vision, 401(k) - up to 4% matching, Unlimited PTO policy

This is a remote role, but candidates must be based in the U.S.