Senior Backend Data Engineer

About Alaffia & Our Mission

The U.S. healthcare system suffers from over $300B in inaccurate payments each year due to fraud, waste, abuse, and processing errors in medical claims. We're on a mission to change that. We're a healthtech company that uses machine learning and AI to prevent inaccurate payments by eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse in medical claims before payments are issued. To help us execute our mission, we've assembled a team of experienced technologists and industry-leading healthcare domain experts.

We're a high-growth, venture-backed, startup based in NYC with alumni ranging from Amazon, Goldman Sachs, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and other leading healthcare and financial institutions.

About the Role & What You'll Be Doing

Alaffia's core value is derived from our health insurance payments data. Building pipelines and infrastructure for processing and transforming this data is an integral part of our work, and we're looking for a talented data engineer who loves designing and building data pipelines and services that enable us to change the world of healthcare. We're looking for someone who relishes the challenges of dataflow system design, implementation and optimization, and enjoys quickly iterating on new pipelines and services in a fast-paced development environment. In this role you'll have the opportunity to build the centerpiece of a healthcare payments platform with real social and economic impact. You'll be making a dent in the struggles of our nation's healthcare payments system from your first day.

What You'll Do & Key Responsibilities:

• Writing production-level code in languages such as Python for our data pipelines and adjacent services
• Designing new services to extract value in a real-time data ingestion context
• Architecting complex data pipelines using Apache Airflow and Kubernetes to enable human-in-the-loop machine learning models in production
• Integrating with technologies like GraphQL and PostgreSQL to create a flexible, performant web app used by healthcare providers, medical claim auditors, and insurers
• Innovating in data engineering by leveraging modern technologies such as Apache Arrow, Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers, Deltalake, and MLFlow
• Engaging in architectural decisions that enable live updates for our users and scalability of the platform to support continuous ingestion of medical claims
• Implementing robust testing suites to validate data processing tasks and verify data integrity
• Working closely with our backend and machine learning engineers to implement new APIs and services to power new in-app functionality
• Collaborating with our Payment Integrity team which consists of experts in medical billing and clinical settings, to incorporate their expertise into core development and data initiatives
• Collaborating with our Product team to enable frontend features empowered by a robust data pipeline
• Managing security challenges centered around private data-at-scale through hardened data access policies such as Postgres Row-Level Security Policies (RLS)

Requirements for the Role:

• 5+ years of data engineering service development and data processing pipeline development
• Algorithmic, Statistical or ML based service development
• Demonstrated experience working in a fast paced, innovation centric environment
• Deep experience with pipeline solutions and modern data related technologies
  • Dataframe frameworks such as Pandas, Polars, Nushell, or Spark
  • Orchestrators such as Airflow or Kubeflow
  • Production level, object oriented code written in Python
  • Testing frameworks in python - Pytest, Poetry, Pydantic
  • PostgreSQL or similar SQL technology
  • Datalakes such as Snowflake, Deltalake, Azure Synapse, or AWS Athena/Glue
• PDF / Image extraction and normalization experience
• Object oriented programming experience
• Large file system and data lake management experience
• Team development and mentorship
• Preferred experience with modern infrastructure platforms and patterns
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • Microservice architectures
  • Message Queues (Kafka, AMQP, Jetstream) and event driven architectures
  • Datadog or similar logging and monitoring solutions
  • Container based workflows with Docker
• Pluses:
  • Experience in the Healthcare, Insurance, or Healthcare Payments Industry
  • Experience working with FHIR, EDI, or 837 data format
  • Experience with Software as a Service (SaaS) enterprise systems
  • Templating languages such as Helm, Jinja, or Go Templates
  • GitHub, CI/CD using GitHub Actions
  • Large Language Model development