Lead Data Engineer
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 enabl ing 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 w arehouse layers bring ing product robustness and maturity . You are comfortable leading work across evolving platforms and stakeholders: aligning on target patterns, ensuring continuity for users and downstream consumers, and delivering incremental improvements while keeping reliability and quality high.
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 a reas 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 end-to-end design and delivery of the data platform (pipelines + warehouse layers), primarily using Prefect, Python and SQL, supported by fit-for-purpose design artefacts and lineage.
- Drive platform evolution by standardising patterns, reducing operational overhead, and improving maintainability and reliability across the data landscape.
- Ensure continuity and quality during change via release planning, validation strategies, risk management, and clear technical stakeholder communication.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to refine requirements, shape delivery plans, and prioritise backlog/work intake based on value, dependencies, and technical constraints.
- Raise engineering standards through reviews, quality practices, and responsible AI-assisted engineering (e.g., accelerating development and strengthening tests/refactoring under clear controls).
- Collaborate with QA to increase test maturity, coverage, and automation for pipelines and data transformations.
- Collaborate with Application and AI/ML leads to integrate data components with the wider product ecosystem (e.g., search and ML pipelines).
- Lead the data engineering team (line management where applicable), coaching engineers and owning work intake and prioritisation.
Requirements
- E xtensive 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 c omfortable writing SQL , both DDL and DML
- Experience as lead or managing developer, or substantial experience a t 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 arc hitecture and design decisions as lead
- Demonstrated use of automation and AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering outcomes (quality, speed, test coverage, maintainability) in a controlled and secure way.
- 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 D ata M anagement of ideally medical ontologies
- Data lineage
- Dutch language skills are a plus for local collaboration and accessing local data sources
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 M L 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
- Y ou 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 .
- 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 . D ata 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
IQVIA is committed to integrity in our hiring process and maintains a zero tolerance policy for candidate fraud. All information and credentials submitted in your application must be truthful and complete. Any false statements, misrepresentations, or material omissions during the recruitment process will result in immediate disqualification of your application, or termination of employment if discovered later, in accordance with applicable law. We appreciate your honesty and professionalism.