Who we are: At Arkana Laboratories, everyone has an important role to fill. Come join us and be a part of a team dedicated to making life better for those who need it most.
This place is packed with super-smart people who do their best work together. We work hard every day to advance our understanding of disease and provide world-class care to our patients in hopes of leaving our corner of the world a little better than we found it. While we are committed to improving the lives of thousands of patients, we never lose sight of the realization that they are the reason we get to create change in our field.
Built on generosity, teamwork, and the freedom to try new things, we take great pride in our work. Great ideas come from everywhere in this company and we celebrate each success and failure for the opportunity it gives us to keep reaching. For more than twenty years after our founder, Dr. Patrick Walker, wrote his goals on the back of a napkin, our people, culture, and values have remained strong.
POSITION SUMMARY
Arkana Laboratories is building a next-generation Laboratory Information System: a modular, cloud-native platform that will power every facet of our renal pathology workflow. The Data Engineer sits at the intersection of application development and analytics and owns the data layer that both groups depend on. Day to day, that means designing and maintaining schemas, building reliable ETL/ELT pipelines, partnering with developers on data contracts, and ensuring analysts have clean, well-documented data to work from. This role works inside a small, high-ownership data team and collaborates directly with backend engineers, product managers, and analysts. The work spans both halves of the operational/analytical boundary, and the engineer is expected to be fluent on both sides.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Application and Schema Work
- Design and maintain PostgreSQL schemas (multi-schema architecture) for LIS application modules
- Author and review Prisma migrations
- Develop data contracts defining access patterns and interface expectations between application modules and the data layer
- Participate in design sprints alongside backend developers and bring data layer constraints into architecture decisions early
- Generate and maintain synthetic test datasets for safe development and QA without production PHI exposure
ETL and Pipeline Development
- Design, build, and operate ETL/ELT pipelines ingesting data from legacy systems and external sources
- Own pipeline reliability end-to-end: monitoring, alerting, retry logic, and runbooks the rest of the team can use
- Help close the open ETL tooling decision (in-app code vs. Azure Data Factory vs. hybrid) and implement the chosen approach
- Build FHIR transformation pipelines that produce clean, clinically relevant output for application consumption
Analytics and Reporting Support
- Maintain and evolve the data warehouse to support dashboards, operational reporting, and ad hoc queries
- Partner with analysts to translate reporting requirements into performant, well-documented data models
- Evaluate Snowflake or similar platforms as analytical reporting demands grow
Data Quality and Governance
- Own the team's data dictionary and documentation standards
- Implement audit-trail and history-table patterns satisfying both HIPAA compliance and operational reporting needs
- Enforce data access controls and column-level security appropriate for a HIPAA and HITRUST environment
Collaboration and Mentorship
- Serve as the data team's representative in design sprints and help enforce intake and triage processes for development team requests
- Mentor analysts growing into data engineering responsibilities
- Produce documentation that makes your work maintainable by others
QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLS
Education
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or a related technical field. Equivalent demonstrated experience considered.
Experience
3-6+ years of hands-on data engineering experience in a production environment, with strong SQL skills including complex queries, query optimization, window functions, and indexing strategies.
Technical Skills
- Experience designing relational schemas in PostgreSQL (or equivalent), with a solid grasp of normalization, foreign keys, and constraint design
- Fluency with Git-based version control and collaborative development workflows including pull requests, code review, and branching
- Experience building and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines with clear ownership of reliability, monitoring, and failure recovery
- Ability to read and reason about application-layer code (TypeScript and Node.js preferred, Python acceptable). You do not need to be a full-stack developer, but you need to understand what the code is doing with the data
- Demonstrated experience documenting data models, data dictionaries, and integration specifications
- Comfortable working in a regulated environment with PHI and a clear understanding of HIPAA data handling obligations
Strongly Preferred
- Experience with PostgreSQL specifically: JSONB, multi-schema design, and Prisma or another TypeScript-native ORM
- Experience with Azure data services (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory, Application Insights)
- Familiarity with FHIR (HL7 R4) data structures and healthcare integration patterns
- Experience supporting both application dev teams (data contracts, schema migrations) and analytics/BI teams (warehouse models, reporting layers)
- Experience with synthetic data generation strategies for safe development environments
Soft Skills
- Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills for complex data issues
- Clear communication across engineering, product, and analytics partners
- Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams
- Comfort working in ambiguity and helping the team converge on durable decisions
Other Qualifications
- Knowledge of data governance frameworks and best practices preferred
- Experience using AI development tools in compliant environments
- Healthcare data domain experience is a plus
DIFFERENTIATING BACKGROUND
This role is intentionally positioned at the boundary between application engineering and analytics. The right candidate is a data engineer who is comfortable participating in application architecture conversations, can hold their own in a design sprint with backend developers, and is equally credible when partnering with analysts on a reporting model. You will own the data layer on both sides of that boundary. The strongest candidates have done both kinds of work in their career and have opinions about how the two should fit together.
This is an onsite position at our main office in Little Rock, Arkansas, applicants must live within 1 hour drive of the main office in Little Rock.
What we offer: We know that health is more than doctor visits and life is more than work. We work hard at Arkana but in turn provide competitive salaries and generous benefit offerings.
Specifically, we offer the following benefits to full-time employees:
- Competitive salary
- Generous paid time off and Paid Holidays
- Minimal cost health insurance for you and affordable options for your family
- 401(k) with immediate eligibility and match
- Company-paid life insurance
- Company-paid long term disability coverage
- Affordable vision and dental plans
- Flexible Spending Account or Health Savings Account availability
- Wellness plan and complimentary yoga classes
- Monthly in-office massages and employer-sponsored lunches
Please see Careers for further information.
