Staff Data Engineer

Company: Cohere Health
Location: Washington
Posted on: January 3, 2026

Job Description:

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to help define and drive the technical vision of our Data Platform team as we scale our infrastructure, services, and architecture. This role is ideal for someone who blends deep technical expertise with strategic thinking and cross-functional influence. As a Staff Engineer, you will lead platform-wide design decisions, shape technical standards, and guide squads through complex engineering challenges. You’ll partner closely with other data and analytics engineers, architects, product leaders, and business stakeholders to evolve our data infrastructure in support of high-trust, scalable, and business-aligned outcomes. You will also serve as a technical mentor and force multiplier across teams; raising the bar for data engineering excellence and accelerating the maturity of our data platform capabilities. What you’ll do: • Define and drive architectural strategy and technical design across squads, ensuring scalability, reliability, and alignment with business needs • Own the long-term technical roadmap for the Data Platform, balancing immediate needs with future-proofing for growth • Serve as a trusted advisor and design authority, guiding critical decisions on data storage formats, processing frameworks, and platform-wide capabilities • Drive cross-squad initiatives such as observability frameworks, data contract enforcement, or schema governance • Continuously evaluate and improve platform reliability, maintainability, and cost-efficiency; reducing manual effort through automation, observability, and scalable design patterns • Champion a high standard of engineering rigor – through documentation, testing, operational readiness, and incident prevention • Mentor and coach engineers across squads, providing deep technical guidance, architecture support, and career development • Evaluate emerging technologies and tools to enhance performance, security, developer experience, and total cost of ownership • Partner with stakeholders across analytics, clinical, product, and operations to ensure the platform meets evolving business needs • Design self-service tooling and frameworks to enable operational, analytics, and engineering teams to efficiently access, explore, and use governed data assets • Actively participate in planning, roadmap alignment, and backlog refinement—ensuring technical work aligns with business priorities and unlocks cross-functional velocity • Define and track KPIs to evaluate platform reliability, performance, and engineering efficiency • Participate in on-call rotations and support continuous improvement of platform reliability, resilience, and recovery mechanisms What you’ll need: • 8 years of experience in data engineering, with demonstrated progression to technically complex and high-impact work • Proven expertise in designing and operating large-scale data infrastructure in cloud-based, distributed environments (e.g., AWS, EMR, Glue, Kafka, Iceberg, dbt) • Fluency in modern data architecture patterns, including medallion/lakehouse models, schema evolution, streaming ingestion, and batch orchestration • Deep understanding of observability, CI/CD, version control, and incident management principles in a data engineering context • Experience shaping engineering standards, frameworks, or libraries used across multiple teams • Exceptional ability to communicate technical strategy to both technical and non-technical audiences • Track record of mentorship and technical leadership across engineering teams • Experience working with healthcare data (e.g., claims, EMR) is a plus • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline

Keywords: Cohere Health, Potomac , Staff Data Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , Washington, Maryland