Staff Application Database Architect (Healthcare)

Location: San Francisco, California; hybrid role

Base salary: $190,000–$250,000 per year, plus bonus and equity.

Company

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

What you will do

• Design, build, and own OLTP databases supporting clinical and operational applications.
• Design schemas, optimize complex queries, and implement indexing, partitioning, connection pooling, caching, replication, and high-availability improvements.
• Define database access practices for Python/Django services, including ORM strategy, transaction management, read/write splitting, and prevention of N+1 queries.
• Set direction for database operations, observability, SLOs, backups, recovery, schema evolution, and incident response.
• Own conceptual, logical, and physical data models for patients, studies, cases, results, devices, and reference data.
• Embed FDA, HIPAA, GDPR, security, privacy, and data-governance requirements into the architecture while supporting data-lake and AI-enablement initiatives.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant industry experience as a backend/application database engineer or data architect.
• Deep hands-on experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Aurora in production web applications.
• Strong Python backend experience with SQLAlchemy and/or the Django ORM, including connection pooling, caching, and transaction management.
• Expertise in transactional data modeling, database performance tuning, indexing, partitioning, replication, and HA/DR.
• Experience with AWS data systems, particularly RDS/Aurora and ElastiCache, including cost, security, and reliability tradeoffs.
• Experience with healthcare, clinical, imaging, or device data and regulations such as FDA, HIPAA, and GDPR; technical leadership and mentoring experience.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with healthcare standards such as FHIR, HL7, or DICOM.
• Experience with data lakes or lakehouses, including S3, Glue, Spark, or Airflow.
• Exposure to metadata, schema registries, ontologies, or semantic layers for AI and agentic systems.
• Data warehousing or ETL experience.

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.
• Opportunities to mentor engineers and influence architecture and technology standards across teams.
• Compensation includes base salary, bonus, and equity.