Head of Data Engineering

Head of Data Engineering — a hands-on leader for HotDoc's data platform

At HotDoc, our purpose is to improve the healthcare experience for everyone in Australia, by improving the way patients and doctors communicate. We're passionate about building products that have a real impact on patient health outcomes and delivering services that support the growth and sustainability of Australian healthcare.

Our data platform sits underneath everything we do: the products practices and patients use every day, the decisions our commercial teams make, and the AI features we're building next. We're looking for a Head of Data Engineering to lead the team that runs it, and to keep building it with them.

The role

You'll lead HotDoc's data engineering function as a member of the technology leadership team, reporting to our CTO. You'll manage a team of data engineers, set data engineering strategy and priorities, and make the major architecture and platform calls.

This is a player-coach role. You'll spend a large part of your week hands-on, building pipelines, reviewing code and setting the standard for how the team works. You'll use agentic workflows in your own work, and move the team from one-off AI-assisted changes to a repeatable engineering-factory model. That means specs, templates, automated checks and agents that raise pull requests for review, so the team can take on more without cutting corners.

You'll help teams set up agents and AI tooling on the data platform, and we need someone who has done this hands-on. Data engineering takes ownership of the datasets and MCP servers that agents query, and the access controls and guardrails around them.

Why this role matters

HotDoc handles sensitive patient and practice information, so how we govern, secure and use data matters as much as how fast we move. You'll set the governance, privacy, de-identification and data access standards (including for AI agents) the whole organisation relies on, and turn our data platform into a foundation for product, commercial and AI outcomes.

What you'll do

• Set data engineering strategy and priorities with the CTO, balancing new capability against reliability and platform debt.
• Own platform architecture, build-vs-buy and vendor decisions, and the function's budget and headcount.
• Lead and develop a team of three senior data engineers.
• Stay hands-on, and move the team to an engineering-factory model: specs, skills, CI checks and agent-raised pull requests.
• Set the factory's guardrails, including skills governance, cost limits and review capacity, and measure the results in throughput and data quality.
• Set the de-identification, masking and tokenisation patterns that keep patient and practice data secure by default.
• Build the datasets and MCP servers agents query, with per-agent least privilege, user identity carried through to data sources, and audit trails.
• In the near term, help teams set up agents and AI tooling until a dedicated AI function takes this on.

What you'll bring

• Deep, hands-on data engineering experience, including time leading engineers while still writing production code.
• Expert SQL and strong Python, plus BigQuery, Metabase (or Snowflake or Redshift), dbt and Airflow.
• A track record of hiring, coaching and scaling senior data engineering teams in high-growth organisations.
• Daily use of agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex, and experience turning that into repeatable team workflows.
• Practical experience protecting sensitive data and controlling AI risks such as prompt injection, data leakage and over-broad permissions.
• The confidence to explain data trade-offs to executives and link them to product and commercial outcomes.

Bonus points

• Experience building MCP servers and agent tool interfaces, such as with Claude Agent SDK or similar.
• Experience in healthtech or another regulated, privacy-sensitive industry.
• Change data capture (Datastream, Debezium) or event pipelines (RudderStack, Segment).
• Familiarity with data de-identification, redaction and tokenisation patterns.

Why HotDoc

• Flexibility to work from home and from our Melbourne HQ.
• Access to our comprehensive Health & Wellbeing Program.
• A generous Learning and Development budget.
• Parental leave benefits program, including paid baby sleep school, first aid courses and EAP for primary and secondary caregivers.
• Company-wide events at our Melbourne HQ several times a year.
• Private and confidential EAP for all employees from day one.
• In-house Career and Strengths Coaching.

Our values are Care, Honesty, Ownership and Fun. We're an employee-first company — we can't provide a great patient and customer experience without first looking after our people.

HotDoc prides itself on being an inclusive and diverse workplace; in fact, we celebrate it. We encourage applications from all backgrounds, communities and industries.

If there are any alternative considerations you might require to perform this role, or anything we can do to assist you in the application process, please let us know.