Staff Data Platform Engineer, Health Plan Data

Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that lets members see simple, upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care. 

Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join!

Ask anyone what their health care will cost, and you will get the same answer: nobody knows. Copays are calculated after the fact, eligibility is a phone call, and “is this provider in my network?” is still a research project. Members find out what they owe at the pharmacy counter or in a bill weeks later, when it is too late to make a better decision.

Helm Health is building the infrastructure that brings forth price transparency. Our platform powers dynamic copay health plans, where a member’s cost is calculated and transparent before care happens, based on who they are, where they go, and what their plan actually covers.

We work with some of our nation’s largest health payors. The platform we build this year will sit underneath the health benefits of a great many people. Getting the data right is not an internal metric at Helm. It is the product.

Every answer Helm gives - Is this provider in network? Is this member eligible? What will this visit cost? - is computed from data: provider networks, eligibility files, claims history, and plan design. Our health plan data platform is not a support function here. It is the foundation every engine and every customer commitment stands on.

We are hiring a Staff to Senior-Staff Data Platform Engineer, Health Plan Data & Services, to lead that foundation on the Health Plan Platform team. This is a platform engineering role: it owns the data platform and pipelines, and the production services and engines that run on them. You will drive the architecture and technical direction for the data platform and shared services across provider network, eligibility, claims, and plan design data, as well as the engines that run on them. The decisions you make in your first six months will shape how this company scales with every payor that follows.

If you want to inherit a finished system and keep the lights on, this is not that job. In this role, you will build the thing itself, with real ownership and a mission you can explain to your family.

Help drive the Helm health data platform architecture. Define and drive the target architecture for how data moves through Helm: ingestion, conformance, storage, and serving across provider network, eligibility, claims, and plan design. Set the patterns every team builds on: data contracts, build once and promote, versioned configuration, traceable lineage.

Technical leadership across the core domains. Lead design for the hardest data problems in health benefits:

Build enterprise grade, audit ready systems. Our customers are regulated payors, and our bar is theirs. You will build for reliability, observability, data quality, and provenance by default: append-only data, versioned config, traceable lineage, in a HIPAA-regulated environment on the path to SOC 2 and HITRUST.

Scale by design, not by headcount. Make onboarding the next payor a configuration exercise instead of a rewrite. Build multi-tenant data services and shared platform capabilities that product teams consume rather than rebuild.

Drive outcomes, not output. Partner with product and engineering leadership to turn the roadmap into sequenced, shippable plans. You are accountable for results: platform reliability, data correctness, delivery. You clear the obstacles in the way, whether or not the code is yours.

Raise the bar around you. Lead design reviews and RFCs, mentor senior engineers, and set the technical standard for the platform organization. At staff level, your impact multiplies through other engineers, not just your own commits.

Use modern tooling, including AI, with judgment. Our engineers use AI coding tools every day, and this role sets the standard for where they genuinely help: code generation, testing, data quality checks, and documentation. Experience applying techniques like entity resolution, anomaly detection, embeddings, and semantic search is a plus.

Nice to have: health plan or payor-side experience; search and relevance systems; gRPC API and SDK design; Dagster or Airflow; dbt or Dataform; experience taking a platform through an enterprise or regulated-industry audit.

We meet quarterly as a company.

Please note that this is a fully remote opportunity.