Staff Application Database Architect

Job Responsibilities:

• Design, Build & Own OLTP Database Systems: Take hands-on ownership of the transactional (OLTP) databases powering Heartflow's clinical and operational applications. Design schemas, write and optimize complex queries, and directly implement performance improvements — indexing, partitioning, connection pooling, caching — for high-throughput, low-latency web services.
• Drive Application Data Access & ORM Strategy: Define and implement best practices for how our Python/Django services interact with the database via the Django ORM. Solve real-world problems like N+1 queries, lazy-loading pitfalls, transaction isolation, connection pool exhaustion, and read/write splitting; review and directly contribute to high-impact schema and query changes in application code.
• Own Database Performance & DBA Excellence: Set direction for database operations — uptime, capacity, backups, recovery, schema evolution, and incident response. Establish SLOs, observability, and runbooks; partner with engineering and SRE teams to keep mission-critical clinical workloads fast, reliable, and secure.
• Lead Transactional Data Modeling: Own conceptual, logical, and physical data models for our operational systems. Drive consistent representation of patients, studies, cases, results, and devices, and steward the master and reference data needed for high-integrity clinical applications.
• Advance the Semantic Structure for AI Agent Context: Contribute to enriching Heartflow's transactional data model with semantics — metadata and controlled vocabularies — so AI agents and downstream consumers can reliably retrieve and reason over clinical and operational information.
• Champion Compliance, Security & Privacy: Ensure data architectures, flows, and access controls strictly adhere to FDA, HIPAA, GDPR, and other applicable standards. Partner with Quality, Regulatory, InfoSec, and Privacy teams to embed compliance into the data lifecycle by design.
• Support the Data Lake & Analytics Handoff (minor, bonus scope): For candidates with the background, partner with IT, Research, and Systems Engineering to ensure OLTP source systems produce clean, well-modeled data that feeds downstream Data Lake and analytics pipelines. This is a supporting responsibility for the right candidate, not a requirement of the role.
• Advance the Semantic Structure for AI Agent Context (minor, bonus scope): For candidates with the background, contribute to enriching Heartflow's transactional data model with semantics — metadata and controlled vocabularies — so AI agents and downstream consumers can reliably retrieve and reason over clinical and operational information.