Base Salary
$190k - $250k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and own high-throughput OLTP databases supporting Heartflow’s clinical and operational applications.
- Design schemas, write and tune complex queries, and implement indexing, partitioning, connection pooling, caching, and other performance improvements.
- Define application data-access and ORM practices for Python/Django services, including addressing N+1 queries, lazy loading, transaction isolation, connection pool exhaustion, and read/write splitting.
- Lead database operations covering uptime, capacity, backups, recovery, schema evolution, incident response, SLOs, observability, and runbooks.
- Own conceptual, logical, and physical transactional data models for patients, studies, cases, results, devices, and master/reference data.
- Enrich transactional data with metadata and controlled vocabularies to support AI agents and downstream consumers.
- Embed FDA, HIPAA, GDPR, security, privacy, and other compliance requirements into data architectures and access controls.
- Partner with engineering, SRE, IT, Research, Systems Engineering, Quality, Regulatory, InfoSec, and Privacy teams on architecture and data-platform decisions.
- Mentor senior engineers and influence engineering standards and technology selection across teams and programs.
- Optionally support clean OLTP source data handoff to data-lake and analytics pipelines.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience; a master’s degree is preferred.
- 10+ years of relevant industry experience as a backend/application database engineer or data architect.
- Deep hands-on OLTP experience with production relational databases supporting web applications or services.
- Expertise in schema design, query optimization, indexing, partitioning, replication, high availability, and disaster recovery.
- Strong Python backend and web-service data-access experience with expert-level SQLAlchemy and/or Django ORM proficiency.
- Deep understanding of connection pooling, Redis or Memcached caching, transaction management, and ORM performance pitfalls.
- Expertise in conceptual, logical, and physical transactional data modeling, including healthcare or clinical-domain modeling.
- Experience building data systems in cloud environments, preferably AWS, with understanding of cost, security, and reliability tradeoffs.
- Experience working with clinical, imaging, or device data under FDA, HIPAA, and GDPR requirements.
- Familiarity with FHIR, HL7, or DICOM is strongly preferred.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading cross-team architectural decisions and engineering standards.
- Data warehousing or ETL experience is a plus.
- Exposure to data lakes or lakehouses, metadata, schema registries, ontologies, or semantic layers is a bonus.
Benefits
- Hybrid work arrangement.
- Bonus and equity are offered in addition to base compensation.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Heartflow
Heartflow is the global leader in AI-driven coronary artery disease (CAD) management, transforming how CAD — the world’s leading cause of death — is diagnosed and treated. Our advanced technology generates personalized, precision 3D heart models from a single CT scan, providing clinicians with the clarity and confidence to deliver earlier, more effective treatments — transforming CAD into a disease that can be managed for life. Heartflow One is the only complete, non-invasive, precision coronary care platform providing patient insights throughout the guideline-directed coronary CTA pathway. The AI-driven platform — including Roadmap™ Analysis, FFRct Analysis and Plaque Analysis — is supported by ACC/AHA guidelines and backed by more than 625 peer-reviewed publications. With over 650,000 patients treated, more than 1,800 leading institutions adopting our solution, and 99.5% of U.S. lives covered — Heartflow is redefining the standard of coronary care. We're a global company, with employees across the United States, Europe and Japan. Our headquarters are in San Francisco, California, with additional offices in California, Texas, the UK and Japan. We believe CAD shouldn’t be a silent threat. We’re changing the story of CAD by making it screenable, diagnosable, and manageable — empowering clinicians to save lives and giving patients more time for what matters most.