Founding Data Engineer (Healthcare)

About Clara

Clara is 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.

Clara's 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 Clara's 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 Clara Offers

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

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

What Your Day to Day Will Look Like

In your first months, you'll be building the data backbone that makes Clara's 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 Clara scales, 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.

Interview Process

1. Intro call (30 min) — Meet founding team, learn about Clara's mission
2. Technical screen (60 min) — Domain-specific challenge
3. Onsite (4 hours) — System design, code pairing, team fit
4. Reference checks + offer