Staff Data Platform Engineer, Health Plan Data

About Helm Health Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that lets members see simple, upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care.

Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join!

The problem we are solving Ask anyone what their health care will cost, and you will get the same answer: nobody knows. Copays are calculated after the fact, eligibility is a phone call, and “is this provider in my network?” is still a research project. Members find out what they owe at the pharmacy counter or in a bill weeks later, when it is too late to make a better decision.

Helm Health is building the infrastructure that brings forth price transparency. Our platform powers dynamic copay health plans, where a member’s cost is calculated and transparent before care happens, based on who they are, where they go, and what their plan actually covers.

We work with some of our nation’s largest health payors. The platform we build this year will sit underneath the health benefits of a great many people. Getting the data right is not an internal metric at Helm. It is the product.

Why this role, why now Every answer Helm gives - Is this provider in network? Is this member eligible? What will this visit cost? - is computed from data: provider networks, eligibility files, claims history, and plan design. Our health plan data platform is not a support function here. It is the foundation every engine and every customer commitment stands on.

We are hiring a Staff to Senior-Staff Data Platform Engineer, Health Plan Data & Services, to lead that foundation on the Health Plan Platform team. This is a platform engineering role: it owns the data platform and pipelines, and the production services and engines that run on them. You will drive the architecture and technical direction for the data platform and shared services across provider network, eligibility, claims, and plan design data, as well as the engines that run on them. The decisions you make in your first six months will shape how this company scales with every payor that follows.

If you want to inherit a finished system and keep the lights on, this is not that job. In this role, you will build the thing itself, with real ownership and a mission you can explain to your family.

What you will do Help drive the Helm health data platform architecture. Define and drive the target architecture for how data moves through Helm: ingestion, conformance, storage, and serving across provider network, eligibility, claims, and plan design. Set the patterns every team builds on: data contracts, build once and promote, versioned configuration, traceable lineage.

Technical leadership across the core domains. Lead design for the hardest data problems in health benefits:

• Provider network data: rosters, networks, and directories that power accurate care search
• Eligibility and enrollment: 834 files, census files, and member data that has to be right every cycle
• Claims: multi-payor claims processing and the data behind adjudication and copay validation
• Plan design: benefit configurations and rules that turn a plan document into computable logic

Build enterprise grade, audit ready systems. Our customers are regulated payors, and our bar is theirs. You will build for reliability, observability, data quality, and provenance by default: append-only data, versioned config, traceable lineage, in a HIPAA-regulated environment on the path to SOC 2 and HITRUST.

Scale by design, not by headcount. Make onboarding the next payor a configuration exercise instead of a rewrite. Build multi-tenant data services and shared platform capabilities that product teams consume rather than rebuild.

Drive outcomes, not output. Partner with product and engineering leadership to turn the roadmap into sequenced, shippable plans. You are accountable for results: platform reliability, data correctness, delivery. You clear the obstacles in the way, whether or not the code is yours.

Raise the bar around you. Lead design reviews and RFCs, mentor senior engineers, and set the technical standard for the platform organization. At staff level, your impact multiplies through other engineers, not just your own commits.

Use modern tooling, including AI, with judgment. Our engineers use AI coding tools every day, and this role sets the standard for where they genuinely help: code generation, testing, data quality checks, and documentation. Experience applying techniques like entity resolution, anomaly detection, embeddings, and semantic search is a plus.

What you will bring

• Staff-level experience (10+ years) designing and building data platforms and distributed systems at scale, with a record of technical leadership across teams
• Expertise in Healthcare data: X12 EDI (834, 837, 835), eligibility, claims, provider data, and/or FHIR. Comfort working with PHI under strict data privacy controls.
• Deep data engineering craft: batch and streaming pipelines, data modeling for analytical and operational serving, data quality and testing discipline, lineage and observability
• Fluency with a modern cloud data stack. GCP preferred (BigQuery, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage), Postgres, Python, Go, orchestration, infrastructure as code. You choose tools pragmatically and can defend the tradeoffs.
• Production service engineering. You have designed, built, and run APIs and distributed services in production, owned their SLOs and on-call, and you are as rigorous about a service contract as a data contract.
• Architecture leadership. You have owned cross-cutting platform decisions, written the design doc, and shipped the result. You favor pragmatic, incremental evolution over big-bang rewrites.
• Ownership and drive. You find the problem, scope it, and land it. Outcomes over activity, always.
• Practical AI experience. You use AI tools and coding agents in your daily workflow and have clear opinions about where they help and where they do not.
• Clear communication. Precise writing, async-first habits, and the ability to make complex systems understandable to engineers, product partners, and executives alike.

Nice to have: health plan or payor-side experience; search and relevance systems; gRPC API and SDK design; Dagster or Airflow; dbt or Dataform; experience taking a platform through an enterprise or regulated-industry audit.

Internal Tools/Technology

• Cursor / Linear / GitHub / Notion / Whimsical
• Slack / Google Workspace / Zoom
• incident.io / Sentry
• Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — we are an AI-forward engineering team
• macOS / Linux

Compensation The target base salary range for this position is $200,000 - $233,000 and is part of a competitive total rewards package including equity and benefits. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors, including experience, skills, location, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations.

Benefits/Offerings

• Base salary + bonus + equity
• Unlimited PTO (mandatory 12 days)
• Computer + home office stipend
• 401(k) + matching
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Autonomy and tons of room for career growth

Occasional Travel We meet quarterly as a company.

Please note that this is a fully remote opportunity.