Senior Data Engineer

Job Posting Title:

Senior Data Engineer

----

Hiring Department:

Dell Medical School

----

Position Open To:

All Applicants

----

Weekly Scheduled Hours:

40

----

FLSA Status:

Exempt from FLSA

----

Earliest Start Date:

Immediately

----

Position Duration:

Expected to Continue

----

Location:

AUSTIN, TX

----

Job Details:

General Notes

The Senior Data Engineer is a highly experienced data professional responsible for leading the design, development, and optimization of complex data pipelines and platforms that support enterprise analytics, reporting, and advanced data use cases. This role serves as a technical leader within the data engineering team, owning moderately large initiatives, guiding architectural decisions, and mentoring Data Engineers.

Reporting to the Director of Data Intelligence and Decision Science (or a designated senior leader), the Senior Data Engineer partners closely with data scientists, analysts, software engineers, informaticists, and business stakeholders. The role ensures scalable, secure, and high-quality data solutions while supporting organizational priorities in clinical, operational, financial, and research domains. The Senior Data Engineer plays a key role in preparing the organization for advanced analytics, automation, and AI/ML adoption, without holding full enterprise-wide ownership reserved for the Principal Data Engineer.

Responsibilities

Leads Design and Optimization of Data Pipelines

• Designs, builds, and maintains complex, scalable ETL/ELT pipelines for structured and unstructured data.

• Leads integration of data from EHRs, financial systems, registries, and external data sources.

• Optimizes pipelines for performance, reliability, fault tolerance, and cost efficiency.

• Implements batch and near–real-time data processing patterns as needed.

• Ensures pipelines meet regulatory, privacy, and security requirements (e.g., HIPAA).

Owns Key Data Platforms and Architecture Components

• Serves as technical owner for specific data platforms, domains, or subject areas (e.g., clinical analytics, operational reporting).

• Designs and maintains data lake, warehouse, and data mart structures using cloud platforms

• Develops and enforces data modeling standards, schema design, and partitioning strategies.

• Partners with IT and cloud teams to ensure availability, scalability, and disaster recovery readiness.

Enables Advanced Analytics and Data Science

• Builds curated, analytics-ready datasets and reusable data assets for analysts and data scientists.

• Collaborates with data science teams to support feature engineering, model training, and deployment workflows.

• Develops frameworks and patterns that improve self-service analytics and reduce ad hoc data requests.

• Supports experimentation and proof-of-concept work for predictive analytics and AI/ML use cases.

Drives Process Improvement and Engineering Best Practices

• Leads initiatives to improve data engineering workflows, including automation, monitoring, and CI/CD for data pipelines.

• Refactors legacy pipelines and infrastructure to improve maintainability and scalability.

• Establishes best practices for code quality, documentation, testing, and version control.

• Evaluates new tools and technologies and recommends adoption where appropriate.

Mentors and Provides Technical Leadership

• Serves as a technical mentor to Data Engineer staff.

• Reviews code, pipeline designs, and architecture artifacts to ensure quality and consistency.

• Provides guidance on complex technical problems and helps unblock team members.

• Contributes to onboarding, internal training, and knowledge-sharing activities.

Collaborates with Stakeholders and Leads Medium-to-Large Initiatives

• Partners with business, clinical, research, and operational stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions.

• Leads data engineering workstreams within cross-functional projects or agile squads.

• Communicates technical concepts, trade-offs, and risks to non-technical audiences.

• Supports planning, estimation, and prioritization of data engineering initiatives.

MARGINAL OR PERIODIC FUNCTIONS

• Supports data integration efforts for new service lines, acquisitions, or system migrations.

• Participates in vendor evaluatio