Staff Application Database Architect (Healthcare)

Location: San Francisco, California; hybrid work

Salary: $190,000–$250,000 base salary annually, plus bonus and equity

Company

hirify.global is a publicly traded medical technology company developing AI-driven, non-invasive solutions for diagnosing and managing coronary artery disease.

What you will do

• Design, build, and own transactional OLTP databases supporting clinical and operational applications.
• Develop schemas, optimize complex queries, and implement indexing, partitioning, connection pooling, caching, and other performance improvements.
• Define database access and ORM practices for Python/Django services, addressing N+1 queries, lazy loading, transaction isolation, connection pool exhaustion, and read/write splitting.
• Lead database operations, including uptime, capacity, backups, recovery, schema evolution, observability, SLOs, runbooks, and incident response.
• Own conceptual, logical, and physical data models for patients, studies, cases, results, devices, and reference data.
• Embed security, privacy, and regulatory compliance into data architectures while supporting AI-ready semantic data and downstream analytics pipelines.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant experience as a backend/application database engineer or data architect with hands-on OLTP experience in production web applications or services.
• Deep expertise in relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Aurora, including schema design, query optimization, indexing, partitioning, replication, and HA/DR.
• Strong Python backend experience with expert-level SQLAlchemy and/or Django ORM knowledge, plus experience with connection pooling, caching, and transaction management.
• Expertise in conceptual, logical, and physical transactional data modeling, preferably for healthcare or clinical domains.
• Experience with AWS data systems, including RDS/Aurora and ElastiCache, and understanding of cost, security, and reliability trade-offs.
• Experience with clinical, imaging, or device data and regulatory requirements including FDA, HIPAA, and GDPR; technical leadership and mentoring experience.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with healthcare standards such as FHIR, HL7, or DICOM.
• Exposure to Data Lake or lakehouse technologies such as S3, Glue, Spark, or Airflow.
• Experience with metadata, schema registries, ontologies, or semantic layers for AI and agentic systems.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on ownership of application-grade data systems used in clinical workflows.
• Collaboration across Engineering, IT, Research, Systems Engineering, Quality, Regulatory, InfoSec, and Privacy.
• Opportunity to influence architecture and engineering standards across multiple teams and programs.
• Base salary is supplemented with bonus and equity.