About The Role

We are looking for an experienced hands-on Engineering Team Lead who reports directly to the Senior Vice President Engineering. This role requires equal strength in technical execution and leadership, combined with people management and strategic influence. You will manage a talented D2E Analyze-Team, shape engineering practices, and collaborate directly with senior leadership across D4L and its partners. As the Analyze-Team lead, you will be actively involved in the technical work contributing to architecture decisions, code reviews, and development to stay close to the challenges your team faces every day.

You will be responsible for enabling your team to deliver high-quality software while continuously improving our engineering practices, architecture, and ways of working.

The ideal candidate brings not only strong leadership and hands-on engineering skills, but also a mindset that questions assumptions, challenges existing approaches, and drives meaningful improvements.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

Own the technical direction of the D2E Analyze team within Data4Life, including architecture decisions, and platform strategy
Lead performance engineering: design and execute systematic performance tests, profile query execution plans across HANA, PostgreSQL, and MS SQL, and implement tuning strategies for analytical workloads at scale
Drive the integration and ongoing evolution of D2E within partner environments, in particular within the Mount Sinai AIR·MS environment
Experience contributing to or influencing of technical and organizational decisions at senior leadership level, i.e. ability to negotiate priorities with product managers, or challenge assumptions with senior management
Guide technical excellence: drive technical decisions and architecture discussions, ensure high standards in software design, code quality, and reliability, help the team balance speed, scalability, and maintainability, identify and address technical debt and system risks
Collaborate with other team leads to align on shared architecture and platform decisions especially when it comes to OMOP CDM extensions and ETL pipelines, ensuring clinical data from structured and unstructured sources is correctly modeled and queryable
Write production-grade code: TypeScript services, APIs, and frontend components, test-suites
Build and maintain infrastructure: Write Helm charts, configure Kubernetes manifests, set up and troubleshoot Azure resources
CI/CD pipelines: Design and maintain GitHub Actions workflows end-to-end
Optimize data workloads: Write and tune analytical queries, design schemas, troubleshoot performance
Contribute to the engineering roadmap and longer-term technical strategy

Stakeholder and Partner Management

Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills
Serve as the primary technical interface with Mount Sinai's engineering and research teams, translating complex requirements into clear engineering decisions and managing expectations on timelines and deliverables
Engage with external technical counterparts who may have strong, competing views. The ability to build productive working relationships while maintaining technical integrity is essential
Communicate directly with non-engineering stakeholders to understand requirements and communicate technical trade-offs
Manage delivery timelines and coordinate with product and stakeholders across different time zones

People Management

Proven experience leading engineering teams in a fast-paced production environment with a track record of shipping complex software reliably
Lead and grow the team: Passion for building high-performing teams and mentoring a team of talented software engineers.
Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Support career development, provide feedback, and performance management and create an environment where engineers can perform their work at highest level
Contribute to engineering hiring and team structure decisions

TypeScript

Extensive, production-level TypeScript experience across frontend and backend
Deep understanding of the type system, async patterns, and ecosystem tooling
Experience building and maintaining RESTful and GraphQL APIs

Data Engineering & Analytical Databases

Hands-on production experience with analytical/columnar databases including schema design, performance tuning, query optimization, and administration (e.g., ClickHouse, DuckDB, BigQuery, Redshift, SAP HANA)
Strong working knowledge of PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server, including index strategies, execution plan analysis, and partitioning
Proven ability to optimize complex analytical queries across columnar and row-oriented databases: indexing strategies, execution plans, partitioning, and materialization

DevOps & Infrastructure

Writes and maintains Helm charts for application releases
Kubernetes experience: deployment, scaling, networking, production troubleshooting
Working knowledge of MS Azure cloud services (AKS, Storage, Networking)
Builds and maintains CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, including test automation and deployment gates

Strongly Preferred

The following are not strict requirements but will have significant weight during the candidate evaluation:

Knowledge of OMOP CDM (Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model): Experience with OMOP data modeling, ETL pipeline, vocabulary management and CDM extensions
Familiarity with HL7 FHIR and related healthcare interoperability standards
Experience with other healthcare data standards (ICD, SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNORM, DICOM, CDISC)
Familiarity with SAP HANA is a plus, particularly given its use in the AIR·MS project at Mount Sinai and in D4L's largest active research program.
Experience with unstructured health data: NLP pipelines, clinical NLP tools, or integration of unstructured text into OMOP-based workflows
Background in health data analytics, clinical research informatics/biomedical informatics, or real-world evidence platforms
Frontend development experience: familiarity with modern frontend frameworks is preferred, in particular experience with analytics-facing UI components
Experience contributing to open-source software projects

GOOD TO KNOW

This role requires regular on-site work in our Singapore office.
This role involves close collaboration with our German team and international partners across regions.
Applicants should currently be based in Singapore.

WHY YOU WILL LOVE WORKING WITH US

This role offers the opportunity to lead a talented team while influencing how engineering evolves across the organization. You will play an important role in improving systems, processes, and collaboration - helping us build better technology and stronger teams.

What We Offer

Meaningful work with real-world impact: Contribute directly to developing digital health solutions that positively impact the health and quality of life of others while finding personal fulfillment in your role.
A direct technical role in a platform used by research programs spanning millions of patients across multiple continents
The opportunity to shape engineering practices and technical direction
A collaborative environment with experienced international engineers and product teams across Singapore, Potsdam and Berlin
Competitive compensation and benefits, e.g. first-class corporate health insurance, subsidised gym memberships, subsidized home broadband benefit
Generous education budget for courses, books, conferences, and professional development.

About Data4life

Data4Life (D4L data4life gGmbH) is a nonprofit health technology organization headquartered at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam, Germany. Founded in 2017 and funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, D4L's vision is to make the world a healthier place.

Our flagship platform, Data2Evidence (D2E), is an open-source real-world data (RWD) analytics environment. D2E bridges standardized health data and cutting-edge research to enable researchers and healthcare organizations to explore, query, and extract insights from large observational datasets. It is built on the OHDSI framework and the OMOP Common Data Model.

With an international team, we work together on the mission to digitalize health research. By linking technology and research, we make health data available to research in a comprehensive, digital, and secure way. Our interdisciplinary team in Potsdam, Berlin, and Singapore brings together experts from fields such as product development, digital engineering, data security, and science. The Singapore engineering team is central to D2E platform development and institutional delivery.

We care about diversity: Many different lives, careers, and development paths lead to Data4Life. We welcome experts from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences to our international team, offering everyone equal opportunities to be themselves and develop to the best of their abilities. Diversity, equality, and inclusion are not just nice words at Data4Life – we put them into practice in all of our activities and projects, striving to incorporate them into our everyday work. For this reason, we signed the Charta der Vielfalt (Diversity Charter) in 2022.

Engineering Team Lead - Data2Evidence