Principal Data Engineer

Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.

Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.

Why this Job?

Cedar is at a pivotal moment in its technical evolution. We are evolving towards a brand-new, enterprise data platform and model, architected specifically to power the future of Cedar’s product offerings. As the Principal Data Engineer, you will be the senior technical authority leading this transition, ensuring our new data foundation is clean, scalable, and cleanly separated from legacy debt.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who loves building production systems at scale and views AI as a massive force multiplier for both personal and team productivity.

What You’ll Do

• Design the Future-State Data Model & Storage: Lead the design and execution of a new, high-scale data model and storage architecture that lives outside our legacy monolith. You will drive decisions on service boundaries, data ownership, and storage patterns—implementing Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold layers) to ensure progressive data quality refinement and performance—while defining the API contracts that will anchor Cedar’s data strategy for years to come. This may include real-time event-driven pipelines and streaming architectures alongside traditional batch processing flows.
• Code, Code, Code: You are a hands-on builder. You will write, ship, and maintain high-quality production code alongside our team of Data Engineers. You will personally model critical domains and implement the core patterns that the rest of the team will follow.
• Ensure Metrics Reliability: Own the accuracy and reliability of Cedar’s core business metrics including collection rate, days in AR, and invoice balance tracking. Design governance and validation frameworks that ensure our source of truth remains consistent across all reporting and product surfaces.
• Power Intelligent Agents: Build the data foundations that power Cedar’s AI-driven products, ensuring agents, like Kora, have the context they need to act autonomously in revenue cycle workflows and transform the patient experience.
• Design for the Future: Design data models for new product lines that expand Cedar’s presence across the full revenue cycle from pre-service through post-service collections.
• Guide and Mentor Engineers: Act as the technical role model for a team of Data Engineers. You will raise the bar for engineering excellence through rigorous code reviews, design guidance, and technical mentorship, turning every challenge into a growth opportunity for the team.
• Collaborate: Drive technical alignment across data engineering, platform, and product teams, set priorities, unblock dependencies, and ensure delivery against customer-facing commitments.

What You Bring

• Strategic Technical Authority: 10+ years of experience in data engineering and backend systems at scale. You have experience leading large technical projects with a strong ownership mentality, focused on delivering value, with a proven track record of shipping production enterprise systems that customers depend on. You have a clear answer to “tell me why your past work required a Principal skillset?”.
• Modern Stack Mastery: Deep, hands-on proficiency with Cedar’s core data tech stack. Must haves include: Snowflake, Python, PySpark, SQL, Kafka, and dbt. You will be tested on these things during the interview process. Other tech that we require at least equivalent experience with include: Liquibase, Fivetran, Airflow, OpenMetadata, data lake patterns, streaming/event driven architectures, CDC (Change Data Capture), and real-time data processing. You have built production-grade ELT/ETL pipelines and managed complex data transformations in cloud-first environments.
• Metrics & Integrity Focus: Experience building "source of truth" systems and a passion for data accuracy. You understand how to define and audit key business metrics to ensure they remain resilient to system changes. You have experience with data validation and reconciliation, comparing pipeline output against source systems and methodically diagnosing discrepancies.
• ML/AI Fuel: You have experience building data APIs, context systems, or feature stores that power downstream ML/AI applications.
• Architectural Judgment: You can spot over-engineering and under-engineering with equal confidence. You know how to design for resilience, modularity, and backwards compatibility. You insist on incremental milestones over big bang deliverables.
• Clear Communication: You can translate complex technical risks and trade-offs into business-relevant terms for senior stakeholders and cross-functional partners.
• AI-Native Workflow: You are an avid learner in general, and an adopter of AI developer tools like Claude Code and Codex. You have experience directing AI agents to generate complete, high-quality solutions and apply your judgment to test and own the output.
• [preferred] Healthcare Domain Expertise: Demonstrable understanding of healthcare concepts, including revenue cycle management (RCM), billing, and insurance adjudication.

Compensation Range and Benefits

• Salary/Hourly Rate Range*: $246,500 - $311,750
• This role is equity eligible
• This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package

*Subject to location, experience, and education

#LI-remote #LI-JJ2

What do we offer to the ideal candidate?

• A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
• Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
• For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
• 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
• Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians)
• Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
• Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
• Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally

About us

Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.