Lead Platform Engineer, Data at Charliehealth

Why Charlie Health? Millions of people across the country are navigating mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and eating disorders, but too often, they’re met with barriers to care. From limited local options and long wait times to treatment that lacks personalization, behavioral healthcare can leave people feeling unseen and unsupported. Charlie Health exists to change that. Our mission is to connect the world to life-saving behavioral health treatment. We deliver personalized, virtual care rooted in connection—between clients and clinicians, care teams, loved ones, and the communities that support them. By focusing on people with complex needs, we’re expanding access to meaningful care and driving better outcomes from the comfort of home. As a rapidly growing organization, we're reaching more communities every day and building a team that’s redefining what behavioral health treatment can look like. If you're ready to use your skills to drive lasting change and help more people access the care they deserve, we’d love to meet you. About the Role As a Lead Platform Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the data models, data access patterns, contracts, database infrastructure, and instrumentation that power our transactional systems. You will be at the intersection of every major engineering initiative, working across Product Engineering, Analytics, ML, and Platform to set the bar for data quality, consistency, usability, scalability, and security. You will ensure great data starts at the moment a feature is built, not as a cleanup task afterward. You'll also own one of the team's most impactful initiatives: designing and migrating to modern data models that reflect how our business works at scale. We’re a team of passionate, forward-thinking professionals eager to take on the challenge of the mental health crisis and play a formative role in providing life-saving solutions. If you’re inspired by our mission and energized by the opportunity to increase access to mental healthcare and profoundly impact millions of lives, apply today. Responsibilities • Define, implement, and evolve data models and schemas in Postgres to support product and analytical use cases. • Develop and maintain our data access standards and patterns in our core backend systems with Python and Typescript. • Lead the definition, design, and phased migration to improved data models for core business concepts. • Work alongside product engineering teams to deliver features with correct and well-modeled data at the source. • Measure and improve data quality, correctness, stability, and usability improvements across our transactional systems. • Provide options around key initiatives and break down work into visible and achievable milestones, delivering incremental value. • Mentor and train other engineers throughout the organization and seek to continually improve our architecture and data modeling standards and engineering processes. • Improve data usability, trust, and developer productivity by building shared tooling, patterns, and documentation that make it easy for teams to produce and consume high-quality data. • Maintain and improve our transactional database infrastructure running in AWS. • Review SQL and data access code for our production systems. • Partner with engineers across the organization to ensure database migrations are executed correctly and safely. • Profile, analyze, and tune slow or inefficient queries in Postgres. • Leverage AI-powered tooling to enhance the software development lifecycle. • Drive security, reliability, scalability, observability, and cost-efficiency improvements across our deployed services. • Hands-on experience participating in an on-call rotation, responding to and resolving critical infrastructure and application issues promptly. • We currently work in Scrumban-style 2-week sprints. Our teams work hybrid (required if in NY) and remotely across time zones, but are available during core meeting hours (12PM to 5PM EST). Requirements • 6+ years of experience in a role focused on Backend or Data Platform Engineering. • 3+ years of experience writing production-level SQL and backend code. • Recent expertise with Python as a primary programming language. • Experience with data modeling concepts and best practices (e.g., dimensional modeling, data vault, or similar). • Experience with observability, monitoring, and logging tools such as Datadog and Cloudwatch. • Proven track record of breaking down large problems and delivering incremental value to meet deadlines while providing options for long-term improvements. • Ability to troubleshoot complex distributed systems. • Familiarity with AI-enabled developer productivity tooling. • Strong communication and problem-solving skills, and the ability to work in a fast-paced startup environment. • Hands-on experience participating in an on-call rotation, responding to and resolving critical infrastructure and application issues promptly. • Please note that team members who live within 45 minutes of a Charlie Health office are expected to follow a hybrid work schedule. Nice-to-Haves • Proficiency with programming languages like Typescript or Golang. • Experience with large data migrations on production systems. • Expertise with AWS services like Aurora, S3, SQS, ECS Fargate, and Lambda. • Proficiency with Snowflake as a cloud data warehouse. • Experience with Data Engineering tools like DBT, Dagster, Fivetran, and Hightouch. • Familiarity with event-driven data architectures and stream processing (e.g., Eventbridge, Kafka, or similar). Benefits Charlie Health is pleased to offer comprehensive benefits to all full-time, exempt employees. Read more about our benefits here. The total target base compensation for this role will be between $175,000 and $255,000 per year at the commencement of employment. Please note, pay will be determined on an individualized basis and will be impacted by location, experience, expertise, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. Further, cash compensation is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may include stock options and other Charlie Health-sponsored benefits. Our Values • Connection: Care deeply & inspire hope. • Congruence: Stay curious & heed the evidence. • Commitment: Act with urgency & don’t give up. Please do not call our public clinical admissions line in regard to this or any other job posting. Please be cautious of potential recruitment fraud. If you are interested in exploring opportunities at Charlie Health, please go directly to our Careers Page: [Upgrade to PRO to see link] Charlie Health will never ask you to pay a fee or download software as part of the interview process with our company. In addition, Charlie Health will not ask for your personal banking information until you have signed an offer of employment and completed onboarding paperwork that is provided by our People Operations team. All communications with Charlie Health Talent and People Operations professionals will only be sent from @charliehealth.com email addresses. Legitimate emails will never originate from gmail.com, yahoo.com, or other commercial email services. Recruiting agencies, please do not submit unsolicited referrals for this or any open role. We have a roster of agencies with whom we partner, and we will not pay any fee associated with unsolicited referrals. At Charlie Health, we value being an Equal Opportunity Employer. We strive to cultivate an environment where individuals can be their authentic selves. Being an Equal Opportunity Employer means every member of our team feels as though they are supported and belong. We value diverse perspectives to help us provide essential mental health and substance use disorder treatments to all young people. Charlie Health applicants are assessed solely on their qualifications for the role, without regard to disability or need for accommodation. 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