Staff Data Architect
ExternalPrepare for this interview
EliteAI-generated questions, company research, and talking points tailored to this role
Benefits
Additional Information
Heartflow is a medical technology company advancing the diagnosis and management of coronary artery disease, the #1 cause of death worldwide, using cutting-edge technology. The flagship product-an AI-driven, non-invasive cardiac test supported by the ACC/AHA Chest Pain Guidelines called the Heartflow FFR CT Analysis-provides a color-coded, 3D model of a patient's coronary arteries indicating the impact blockages have on blood flow to the heart. Heartflow is the first AI-driven non-invasive integrated heart care solution across the CCTA pathway that helps clinicians identify stenoses in the coronary arteries (RoadMap™Analysis), assess coronary blood flow (FFR CT Analysis), and characterize and quantify coronary atherosclerosis (Plaque Analysis). Our pipeline of products is growing and so is our team; join us in helping to revolutionize precision heartcare. Heartflow is a publicly traded company (HTFL) that has received international recognition for exceptional strides in healthcare innovation, is supported by medical societies around the world, cleared for use in the US, UK, Europe, Japan and Canada, and has been used for more than 500,000 patients worldwide. This position will play a pivotal technical leadership role in realizing Heartflow's vision of a single, comprehensive platform to manage heart disease. As a Staff Data Architect, you will lead the data strategy for our medical device system-defining how clinical, imaging, and operational data is structured, stored, accessed, and governed across our AWS-based platform and partner ecosystems. You will own the architectural roadmap for our transactional databases, analytical Data Lake, and the pipelines that connect them. Operating at the staff level, you will set the standards for data modeling, query performance, and access patterns, partner deeply with Software Engineering, IT, Research, and Systems Engineering, and elevate the semantic structure of our data so that our products-including emerging AI agents-operate on a trustworthy, well-described, and compliance-ready foundation. Job Responsibilities: Lead Data Strategy for the Medical Device System: Define the multi-year data architecture vision spanning transactional databases, Data Lake, and downstream consumers. Translate product, clinical, and regulatory requirements into a coherent data strategy that scales as Heartflow's portfolio grows. Oversee Database Performance & DBA Excellence: Set direction for database operations across the platform-uptime, capacity, backups, recovery, schema evolution, and incident response. Establish SLOs, observability, and runbooks; partner with engineering and SRE teams to ensure mission-critical clinical workloads remain fast, reliable, and secure. Lead Enterprise Data Modeling: Own conceptual, logical, and physical data models across operational and analytical systems. Drive consistent representation of patients, studies, cases, results, and devices, and steward the master data and reference data needed for high-integrity clinical reporting. Partner with Software Engineering on Query Performance & Access Patterns: Embed with product engineering teams to improve indexing, partitioning, caching, and read/write patterns. Coach engineers on data access best practices, review high-impact query and schema changes, and reduce cost and latency at scale. Architect the Data Lake & Data Pipelines: Partner with IT, Research, and Systems Engineering teams to design and evolve the Data Lake, lakehouse layers, and ingestion/transformation pipelines. Define standards for data contracts, lineage, quality, and governance from source-of-truth systems through curated analytical and ML-ready datasets. Advance the Semantic Structure for AI Agent Context: Lead efforts to enrich Heartflow data with semantics-ontologies, controlled vocabularies, schema registries, and metadata-so that AI agents and downstream consumers can reliably retrieve, reason over, and act on clinical and operational information. Champion Compliance, Security & Privacy: Ensure data architectures, flows, and access controls strictly adhere to FDA, HIPAA, GDPR, and other applicable standards. Partner with Quality, Regulatory, InfoSec, and Privacy teams to embed compliance into the data lifecycle by design. Provide Technical Leadership: As a staff-level technical multiplier, mentor data and software engineers, set engineering standards for data work, influence technology and tool selection, and represent the data architecture function in cross-functional planning, hiring panels, and roadmap reviews. Skills Needed: You have experience in the following: Data Architecture & Strategy: Defining multi-year data architecture for complex, regulated platforms-spanning OLTP databases, Data Lakes / lakehouses, streaming pipelines, and downstream analytical and ML consumers. Database Engineering & DBA Leadership: Deep expertise in relational and modern cloud databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Aurora, Snowflake, Redshift