Clara→
Founding Data Engineer at Clara in San Francisco, CA
Job Description
Founding Data Engineer at Stealth Health Startup
Location: San Francisco, CA · Visa sponsorship: yes
Founding Data Engineer (Health Tech)
Status: To Hire
Target Start: February 16, 2026
Location: San Francisco (5 days/week in-person)
Comp: $145,000 - $215,000 + 0.1%-0.4% equity
About Us
We are building the first AI-first medical practice from the ground up. We're reimagining primary care and providing patients with deep insights and immediate diagnosis and treatment in ways not previously possible.
Unlike most health AI startups, we deliver actual care — our clinical team writes prescriptions, orders labs, and manages patients. You'll build the data infrastructure that powers real medical decisions, not a demo.
Founders have built and scaled a previous telemedicine company to over $100M in revenue and we're funded by top investors.
What You'll Build
You'll own data foundation — the pipelines that ingest, normalize, and deliver patient health records to our AI and clinical team. Healthcare data is notoriously messy (FHIR bundles, CCDAs, scanned PDFs, lab feeds), and you'll turn that chaos into clean, structured data our AI can reason over.
You'll work directly with our clinical team — physicians and nurse practitioners who depend on what you build to treat real patients every day.
Your Responsibilities
Data Ingestion & ETL (50%)
Build pipelines to ingest medical records from HIEs, EHRs, and patient uploads
Process FHIR bundles, HL7 messages, and CCDAs into normalized data models
Extract structured data from unstructured sources (PDFs, scanned documents, XML, HTML, JSON)
Handle webhook processing for real-time data feeds
Build robust error handling and data validation
Data Infrastructure (30%)
Design and maintain data models optimized for AI retrieval and clinical workflows
Build efficient storage and retrieval systems on AWS (S3, DynamoDB)
Implement data compression strategies for large medical records
Create data sanitization and PII handling pipelines
Monitor data quality and pipeline health
Healthcare Data Standards (20%)
Ensure compliance with FHIR/HL7 standards
Map between different healthcare data formats
Stay current on healthcare interoperability requirements
Work with external data partners and APIs
Tech Stack
Backend: Python
Data Formats: FHIR, HL7, CCDAs, PDF, XML, JSON
Cloud: AWS
Database: PostgreSQL
What We're Looking For
Required
5+ years software engineering with significant experience processing healthcare data
Deep knowledge of FHIR bundles, HL7, and healthcare data standards
Strong Python skills for data processing workflows
Experience with document extraction from messy sources (PDF, XML, HTML, JSON)
AWS experience (S3, DynamoDB)
Understanding of data sanitization and PII handling in healthcare
AI-native (uses Claude/Cursor daily)
Ideal
Built ETL pipelines at scale for healthcare organizations
Experience with medical document parsing and text extraction
Familiarity with HIE integrations and health data networks
Built webhook-based real-time data systems
Understanding of HIPAA technical requirements
What We Offer
Impact
Ship code that affects real patient health outcomes
Make architectural decisions for an AI-first medical practice
Work directly with CTO on technical strategy
Team & Culture
High-performance founding team at the forefront of healthcare AI
Work alongside clinicians — our medical team delivers real care (prescriptions, lab orders, referrals), so you'll see your data pipelines impact patient outcomes directly
In-person collaboration in San Francisco (5 days/week)
No bureaucracy, ship fast
Compensation
Component
Range
Base Salary
$145,000 - $215,000
Equity
0.1% - 0.4%
Benefits
Health insurance, standard benefits
Growth
First engineering hires → opportunity to become engineering managers as team scales
Ownership of entire domains (data, AI, product, platform)
Work with cutting-edge AI and healthcare technology
Interview Process
Intro call (30 min) — Meet founding team, learn about our mission
Technical screen (60 min) — Domain-specific challenge
Onsite (4 hours) — System design, code pairing, team fit
Reference checks + offer
What Your Day to Day Will Look Like
In your first months, you'll be building the data backbone that makes our AI possible — integrating with health data networks to pull patient medical records in seconds, processing messy FHIR bundles and CCDAs into clean structured data, and building pipelines for lab results and clinical documents. You'll wrangle healthcare data in all its chaotic forms: scanned PDFs, XML feeds, JSON payloads, and webhook streams. Every pipeline you build feeds directly into our AI and clinical workflows, so you'll see the impact immediately when a doctor reviews a patient's complete medical history that your code assembled.
As we scale, your responsibilities will evolve. You'll have the opportunity to grow into engineering leadership, architect data systems for millions of patients, mentor new hires, and own increasingly complex integrations with health networks and wearables. The data challenges you solve today will look different from the scale problems you tackle in a year — and that's exactly what makes this a founding role.
We will assist with relocation and work visas for the right candidate.
Contact
Interested? Reach out to george@clarahealth.us and cuau@clarahealth.us