Senior Data Platform Engineer

Overview

At Sword, we’re building AI to heal billions and unlock humanity’s full potential. Sword is pioneering AI Care — a healthcare approach focused on medical reasoning, safety, and real-time treatment, not generic technology applied after the fact. Sword combines a clinical-centric frontier AI lab and an applied AI platform to reimagine care delivery at scale, removing barriers like appointments, waiting rooms, and stigma so more people can access the care they need.

Since 2020, Sword has expanded across physical therapy, women’s health, cardiometabolic, and mental health, and is moving from sessions to a fully AI-native, 24/7 care program that integrates physical activity, therapeutic exercise, psychotherapy, nutrition, and behavior change into one connected experience. Sword has 700,000+ members across three continents, with 1,000+ enterprise clients and a history of clinical studies, patents, and funding from major investors.

Role and Team

Data Platform Team builds the foundation that makes data usable across clinical, operations, AI, and product teams: a modern streaming lakehouse, low-latency data movement, durable workflows, and an API-first surface enabling self-service for producers and consumers while reducing the need for infrastructure context.

This role targets an engineer who treats data platforms as products. You should have experience building or operating data systems at scale, a holistic view from storage format to query engine, and an interest in shaping self-service and agentic experiences layered on top of the data foundation.

To learn more about our tech stack, please review the information available internally.

AI Proficiency

AI fluency is a core expectation. All candidates are assessed against a three-level framework. Be ready to share real examples of how AI is already part of your work.

• Explorer (Level 1) — Uses AI daily to boost personal productivity
• Builder (Level 2) — Creates workflows and tools that elevate the whole team
• Integrator (Level 3) — Embeds AI into products and processes at scale

Every hire must demonstrate at least Level 1. The expected level will vary with role seniority.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve Sword’s streaming lakehouse — the foundation that every data consumer depends on.
• Build and operate distributed streaming pipelines with low latency and high reliability.
• Own durable workflows coordinating complex data movement across systems.
• Shape the platform’s API surface for producers and consumers to avoid direct infrastructure interaction.
• Evaluate and integrate with vendor data platforms, considering architectural trade-offs.
• Contribute to self-service and agentic layers: interfaces for humans, systems, and AI agents.
• Collaborate with data engineers and analysts on contracts, governance, and lineage.
• Build and maintain AI-ready data infrastructure powering ML and AI-driven products.
• Leverage AI coding assistants and LLMs to accelerate development, documentation, and code quality.
• Operate in a regulated environment where audit, compliance, and governance are integral to design.

Qualifications

• Proven experience designing and operating data platforms at scale (warehouse, data lake, or lakehouse) in production.
• Hands-on experience with a modern lakehouse table format (Iceberg strongly preferred; Delta Lake or Hudi also welcomed).
• Understanding of catalogs (REST, Polaris, Glue, Unity, Hive) and the trade-offs when compute is detached from storage.
• Exposure to at least one vendor lakehouse or query platform (e.g., Snowflake, Starburst, Databricks) with architectural reasoning ability.
• Strong experience with a distributed processing engine (Flink preferred; Spark also acceptable) and ability to reason about internals, tune jobs, and debug data pipelines.
• Familiarity with durable execution concepts (Temporal, Restate, or equivalent) and why they matter for data workflows.
• Production experience building and operating APIs (REST or gRPC) at scale with solid understanding of contracts, versioning, retries, and observability.
• Solid understanding of Kafka and event-driven architectures (producers/consumers, partitioning, delivery semantics).
• Comfort operating in regulated environments (healthcare, fintech, government) with audit, compliance, and data governance in design.
• Platform mindset: designing for self-service and API-first consumption by humans, systems, and agents.

Bonus

• Deeper familiarity with open/REST catalogs beyond basic use.
• Observability stack fluency (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with agentic or AI-facing APIs or MCP-style interfaces.
• Experience in HIPAA, FedRAMP, or SOC 2 environments.
• Exposure to dbt, DataHub, or data contract tooling.

Mindset and Collaboration

• Service orientation: build APIs and agent-facing tools that others love to use.
• Reliability-first: design with failure modes, retries, and observability in mind.
• Cross-functional collaboration with data engineers, analysts, and ML engineers.
• Documentation mindset: great APIs come with great docs, including machine-readable formats.
• Iterative: ship incrementally and improve based on feedback.

Benefits and Note

This range includes base, variable, and equity. Compensation is adjustable based on experience and impact. Our job titles may span multiple levels, with actual pay determined by skills, qualifications, experience, location, market demand, and other factors. The compensation detail reflects base salary and potential variable compensation, plus stock options if applicable.

Portugal - Sword Benefits & Perks: health, dental and vision insurance; meal allowance; equity shares; remote work allowance; flexible hours; work from home; discretionary vacation; snacks and beverages.

Note: This position does not offer relocation assistance. Candidates must possess a valid EU visa and be based in Portugal.

Sword Health complies with applicable civil rights laws and does not discriminate on the basis of age, ancestry, color, citizenship, gender, gender identity, medical condition, national origin, disability, pregnancy, race, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status.