Lead Data Engineer

About IQVIA Patient Finder

We live in a world where most information is readily available at our fingertips. You might be surprised to learn the situation in hospitals is rather different. Systems used for electronic healthcare records (EHR) facilitate the clinical workflow, retrieving and storing information for each patient. There is, however, a large need for secondary usage of this data. Think of linking patients to clinical trials, medical research studies, and care quality assessment. For this purpose IQVIA has developed a search engine enabling medical professionals to find patient cohorts and collect data. In all that we do, we have the doctors and patients at the fore of our mind, and we also ensure to strictly adhere to privacy regulations.

Patient Finder is currently used on a daily basis by 40+ hospitals in The Netherlands and Belgium and is expanding into other international markets.  The product is a scale-up within a larger corporation, meaning the product is proven while there is still room to make your own mark and propose creative solutions.

The role and your profile

We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to drive technical direction of data pipeline and data warehouse layers bringing product robustness and maturity during this scale-up period, collaborate with product management to effectively prioritise new features and project needs, and deliver with a team of skilled data engineers.

You can make decisions when multiple potential approaches are identified taking into account existing codebase, reduction of operational overhead, team strengths and business priorities.

You will have the ability to mentor and coach data engineering colleagues to support their weekly responsibilities, ongoing professional development, job satisfaction and career potential.

You are a hands-on, self-directed individual who can bring experience in data engineering to identify incremental or substantial areas of improvement, leading on implementation with best practices.

You are a professional who is passionate about improving healthcare and having a real impact having developed yourself as a data engineer with a software engineering background. You have an appetite to learn and develop yourself, an innate curiosity, and can bring to light clarity around abstract and unclear problems. You feel comfortable working in a self-organizing company.

Key Responsibilities
 

• Lead Design and Development of the data warehouse & ETL pipeline ecosystem, primarily orchestrated within a Prefect-driven architecture utilising Python and SQL.
   
• Deliver data components which differentiate the application within the healthcare and medical research domains, producing robust components deployable in Windows-based and Linux-based environments, implementing new features both large and small, optimising existing functionality.
   
• Design, implement, and improve Python data pipelines with a wide variety of healthcare data sources
   
• Develop SQL data transformations and connectors for new medical data sources
   
• Peer review of colleague’s contributions
   
• Help product owners refine JIRA Epics and User Stories from a technical perspective

• Improve quality through both design decisions and also simply resolving bugs.
   
• Collaborate with other lead developers in Application and AI-Machine Learning teams to integrate other components of the software application such as ElasticSearch and AI / Machine Learning pipelines.
   
• Own design documentation including logical and physical data models, mappings, data flow, data lineage, UML & Entity-Relationship diagrams

• Collaborate with QA to improve test maturity, coverage and automation

• Participate in technical work stream planning with Product and Development teams to clarify requirements, deliverables, monitor/review risks, and provide the necessary engineering expertise & support to ensure delivery.
   
• Line management of data engineering team, owning work intake and prioritisation

Requirements

• Extensive experience with Python in a testable and scalable fashion
• History of successfully developing data pipelines (e.g. Prefect, Airflow, Luigi, Dagster)
• Hands on experience with RDBMS (Microsoft SQL or PostgreSQL preferred) and comfortable writing SQL, both DDL and DML
• Experience as lead or managing developer, or substantial experience at senior level.
• You are able to clearly explain and translate conceptual ideas and technical rationale to technical and non-technical colleagues
• You have worked as part of teams consisting of 4 or more developers and are used to having your ideas challenged and providing constructive criticism to others
• Ability to autonomously make architecture and design decisions as lead
• Experience with DevOps workflows, especially CI/CD
• Good interpersonal communication and presentation skills
• Attention to detail
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills
• You are based in Europe, ideally commutable to Amsterdam, Netherlands

Nice to have

• Knowledge of medical data standards such as FHIR based data exchange and/or OMOP
• Exposure to healthcare / life sciences / clinical trials / pharmaceutical data
• Master Data Management of ideally medical ontologies
• Data lineage

Opportunities

• You will be a part of innovation in the medical field, contributing to improved outcomes for healthcare patients and providers
• You will have the opportunity to be responsible for technical communication and preparation in cross-team projects. This will often mean online collaboration with international colleagues.
• You will collaborate with Machine Learning specialists gaining exposure to ML and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Medical data is an interesting problem space, both in complexity and in societal value. The texts are a domain of its own with extremely high information density. It gives a real kick when users let us know they were able to collect data they were unable to use previously, such as finding people with a rare disease that might take years otherwise to diagnose or rapidly building quality datasets for COVID research
• You will be part of a larger, cross-functional and dynamic team consisting of developers, designers, medical consultants and ML engineers.

About us

• Our Data team currently consists of 1 product owner, 5 developers, 1 data modeller.
• The Patient Finder team consists of approximately 30 people organised across three development squads (App, Data, AI/ML), Deployment, Support and Consultancy.
• Patient Finder team is part of a larger healthcare product portfolio across the EMEA region within the IQVIA business.
• Our team largely works from home but employees are free to choose between office, home, or hybrid work locations.  Data team typically attend the office weekly.
• The team is currently location across Amsterdam and Madrid.

IQVIA is a leading global provider of clinical research services, commercial insights and healthcare intelligence to the life sciences and healthcare industries. We create intelligent connections to accelerate the development and commercialization of innovative medical treatments to help improve patient outcomes and population health worldwide. Learn more at https://jobs.iqvia.com