WRS Health is seeking a hands-on and strategic Director of Data Architecture to lead our data platform initiatives on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a strong emphasis on healthcare data, data lake strategy, and AI enablement. You will architect and manage scalable, secure, and high-performance data systems that support both traditional analytics and modern ML workloads, including embedding models and vectorized data retrieval.
Key Responsibilities:
Strategic Data Platform Leadership
- Define and implement an enterprise-wide data architecture strategy that supports interoperability, AI/ML readiness, and regulatory compliance.
- Lead the evolution of our AWS-based data lake architecture, supporting structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data types—especially FHIR-formatted JSON healthcare data.
Cloud Data Lake & Storage Optimization
- Design and maintain scalable, secure, and cost-effective data lakes using Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Athena, Redshift, and Lake Formation.
- Leverage Mountpoint for S3 to enable high-performance, POSIX-compliant access to S3 objects, including vectorized data files.
- Optimize data storage and retrieval strategies for performance and cost-efficiency, including partitioning, file formats (e.g., Parquet, ORC), and compression techniques.
AI/ML Enablement and Vector Infrastructure
- Collaborate with data science teams to implement embedding models, vectorization pipelines, and real-time inference architectures.
- Design and manage vector storage systems (e.g., S3-based, FAISS, Pinecone, or Amazon OpenSearch) to support semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and intelligent data access.
- Ensure vectorized data pipelines are aligned with model training, evaluation, and deployment strategies.
Healthcare Data Architecture & Interoperability
- Architect systems to ingest, process, and store FHIR-compliant JSON data from EHRs, APIs, and HL7 sources.
- Ensure conformance with healthcare interoperability standards and optimize for queryability and downstream analytics.
- Implement data normalization and enrichment pipelines for use in both clinical and operational contexts.
Security, Compliance & Governance
- Lead efforts to ensure data security at rest and in transit using AWS-native encryption, IAM, VPC controls, and bucket policies.
- Implement and manage data access controls, audit logging, and role-based security models across AWS environments.
- Oversee data governance including lineage, cataloging, and stewardship with tools such as AWS Glue Data Catalog, Lake Formation, or third-party platforms.
Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Build and lead a high-performing team of data architects and engineers.
- Work closely with stakeholders from engineering, data science, product, and compliance teams to deliver data initiatives.
- Promote data literacy and foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field.
- 8–12+ years of experience in data architecture with 3–5 years in a technical leadership role.
- Proven experience architecting AWS-based data lakes and analytics pipelines.
- Deep understanding of healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7) and working with FHIR JSON objects in large-scale systems.
- Expertise with embedding and vectorization models, semantic search, and managing vector storage solutions.
- Hands-on experience with Amazon S3, Mountpoint for S3, and optimizing S3-based workloads for performance and cost.
- Strong background in data security, encryption, access control, and compliance frameworks (HIPAA, HITRUST).
Preferred Qualifications
- AWS certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Big Data or Data Analytics – Specialty).
- Familiarity with open-source vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Weaviate) and MLOps pipelines.
- Experience in clinical systems integration, claims processing, or population health analytics.
This is an independent contractor position.
Job Type: Full-time
Location: Remote
Hours: Available during standard US business hours (9am-5pm EST or 8:30am-4:30pm EST)
This job description is intended to describe the general requirements for the position. It is not a complete statement of duties, responsibilities or requirements. Other duties not listed here may be assigned as necessary to ensure proper operations of the department.