Data Architect III - Independent Contractor (Remote, Canada)

Company Overview

Policy Reporter offers a suite of insights products and consulting services to enhance market access strategies and patient support initiatives. By tracking payer policies in near real time, we ensure that the largest pharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostics manufacturers, leading academic institutions and organized provider groups have the most up-to-date data and evidence-based guidance to help patients access the therapies they need. For more information, please visit https://www.policyreporter.com.

About the Team

We’re a team of engaged developers who love building reliable, scalable systems that solve direct customer problems. We’re a friendly and collaborative team and have found value in being open to learning new technologies and eager to dive into our applications to tackle a wide variety of technical issues.

As a team we are making significant investments into our tech stack by improving our data structure, increasing automation, scalability, and software quality. We have a challenging problem of building a comprehensive database of payer policy data and keeping it up to date.

The technologies that we love include but are not limited to Python, PHP, React, ML/LLMs, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Docker, AWS. We care deeply about building quality products.


Position Summary


We are looking for a self-directed, result driven contractor who is ready to experiment with finding solutions for difficult problems, appreciates challenges, is not afraid of asking questions, and enjoys working with others. This position focuses on modelling a complex commercial market and providing a performant and scalable solution for data delivery.


Role & Responsibilities


Contribute to projects by consulting on, reviewing, designing and/or implementing data models, storage systems and queries, as well as the code which interfaces with same, in order to help developers leverage our data effectively
Advise on proposed model changes to best suit our long-term goals and support existing technical and business needs
Identify, assess and address performance issues and logical bugs related to suboptimal usage of big data via model, schema and code changes
Collaborate with teams across our organization to distill complex product requirements into realistic, performant and intuitive data structures
Advocate for and educate others about best practices related to software development in general and data architecture in particular
Proactively identify roadblocks and anti-patterns in our system - analyze situations, coordinate troubleshooting and problem solving activities, ensure proper follow up for post-incident analysis are completed and implement necessary process improvements

Skills & Qualifications


5+ years building a variety of applications on top of a mix of relational and NoSQL data storage.
Familiarity with AWS RDS, Aurora and Redshift are a plus
Very comfortable with PostgreSQL and familiar with other SQL dialects
A solid understanding of how relational databases (particularly PostgreSQL) work “under the hood” including configuration and performance tuning
Knowledge of PHP and/or Python
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering discipline or equivalent experience
Experience communicating directly with customers to synthesize requirements and align them with business goals. Excellent ability to transform requirements from everyday English into technical plans, database table schemas, data structures, etc.
Ability to structure and rework applications and models for long-term maintenance and ongoing flexibility
Experience writing queries to drive reporting systems whether they be traditional webpages, react components or RESTful APIs
Great communication skills (written and verbal – with both technical and non-technical audiences)
Knowledgeable in best practices around caching, indexing, and other performance salves
Policy Reporter’s Core Values

Excellence
Value & Respect
Continuous Learning
Ownership & Accountability
Teamwork
Policy Reporter is committed to Employment Equity. Accommodations during the recruitment process are available upon request for candidates with disabilities