Principal Engineer, Data

About this role

Thank you for considering a career at Ensemble!
Ensemble is a leading provider of technology-enabled revenue cycle management solutions for health systems, including hospitals and affiliated physician groups. They offer end-to-end revenue cycle solutions as well as a comprehensive suite of point solutions to clients across the country.
Ensemble keeps communities healthy by keeping hospitals healthy. We recognize that healthcare requires a human touch, and we believe that every touch should be meaningful. This is why our people are the most important part of who we are. By empowering them to challenge the status quo, we know they will be the difference!
O.N.E Purpose:

• Customer Obsession: Consistently provide exceptional experiences for our clients, patients, and colleagues by understanding their needs and exceeding their expectations.

• Embracing New Ideas: Continuously innovate by embracing emerging technology and fostering a culture of creativity and experimentation.

• Striving for Excellence: Execute at a high level by demonstrating our “Best in KLAS” Ensemble Difference Principles and consistently delivering outstanding results.

The Opportunity:
As Principal Data Engineer, you will serve as Ensemble’s senior technical authority on data architecture — a high‑level individual contributor, not a people manager. You will assess data engineering practices across the organization, architect solutions that scale across teams, and establish a strong foundation for AI‑driven capabilities across the organization.
You will architect and design a cloud‑native data platform built on Azure and Databricks, enabling trusted, governed, and reusable data products that accelerate insight generation, operational automation, and emerging AI use cases. You will also own the organization’s data engineering technology roadmap, staying ahead of emerging tools and techniques and recommending what we should evaluate or adopt next.
This role serves as a technical escalation point and architectural authority for the Data Platform, influencing performance, scalability, cost optimization, developer experience, and long‑term sustainability of Ensemble’s data ecosystem through credibility and technical judgment rather than formal authority.
Job Competencies:
Technical Decision Making - Makes sound architectural and technical decisions by gathering and weighing information from multiple sources, evaluating trade-offs against reliability, cost, and scalability; clearly communicates decisions and rationale to technical and non-technical stakeholders; drives results through the strength of the recommendation, not positional authority.
Technical Mentorship - Elevates the capability of senior and staff engineers by sharing architectural thinking, providing design-review feedback, and modeling sound engineering judgment; develops others through example and coaching rather than formal supervision, without holding management responsibility for their performance or career progression.
Influencing Without Authority - Drives adoption of architectural standards and technical direction across teams through credibility, clear reasoning, and relationship-building rather than reporting lines; earns buy-in from engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders who do not report to this role.
Cross-Functional Collaboration - Builds productive working relationships across data engineering, analytics, data science, product, and platform teams to align architectural decisions with business goals, without formal authority over those teams.
Technical & Executive Communication - Clearly and succinctly conveys complex architectural and technical concepts to both engineering peers and executive stakeholders; communicates in a focused and compelling way that captures and holds others’ attention (appropriate, impactful, and clear).
Technical Program Ownership - Demonstrates high accountability for architectural initiatives and proofs of concept from inception through adoption; considers cost and resourcing impact to ensure maximized output, reduced waste, and exceptional results.
Innovation & Continuous Learning - Stays ahead of the industry by continuously evaluating emerging tools, frameworks, and techniques for genuine fit within the organization; runs proofs of concept to validate new approaches before recommending broader adoption, rather than chasing trends for their own sake.
Job Functions:
Customer Obsession: Consistently provide exceptional experiences for our clients, patients, and colleagues by understanding their needs and exceeding their expectations.
Embracing New Ideas: Continuously innovate by embracing emerging technology and fostering a culture of creativity and experimentation.
Striving for Excellence: Execute at a high level by demonstrating our “Best in KLAS” Ensemble Difference Principles and consistently delivering outstanding results.
Technical Assessment & Architecture

• Conduct cross-organizational assessments of existing data pipelines, platforms, and engineering practices to identify inefficiencies, technical debt, risk, and opportunities for improvement.

• Architect scalable, secure, and cost-efficient data solutions that span multiple teams and business domains, built on Databricks and Azure.

• Act as a technical escalation point for the organization’s hardest data engineering problems, diagnosing recurring or systemic reliability issues in tier-1 pipelines and datasets.

• Define and evolve data engineering standards, patterns, and architectural guardrails used across engineering teams, balancing standardization with the flexibility teams need to move quickly.

AI & Advanced Analytics Enablement

• Establish and evolve a data platform architecture that enables AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics workloads, including feature readiness, training data quality, lineage, and observability.

• Partner with Data Science, Analytics, Product, and Cloud teams to ensure data platforms support model…