Staff Application Database Architect

Heartflow

San Francisco, California
Onsite
Posted 2026-09-11

Make my CV for this job, free View job and applyYour CV, rewritten for this role using only your real experience. Sign in with Google and upload your CV. Nothing to install.

Skills named in this job

Django
Python
AWS
Data modelling
Airflow
Data warehousing
ETL
MySQL
Observability
PostgreSQL

Read from the description itself, not inferred.

This role on the market

1,260 open application roles across 217 companies are on ApplySarthi right now, most of them in Bengaluru (102), Hyderabad (74), Delhi NCR (62).

Application Security EngineerPokemoncareers
LLM Application EngineerBjak
Senior Application Security EngineerDatadog
Generative AI Application Developersfa-etvl-saasfaprod1 · pune
Application Security EngineerSonarsource

What application roles keep asking for: Python (13%) — counted across their open postings here.

AWS jobs · Airflow jobs · Data modelling jobs · Data warehousing jobs

Heartflow has 103 open roles listed here.

Counted across 14 company job boards, updated as roles open and close.

Preparing for this interview

Interviews for application roles keep coming back to Python. Practise those questions before you sit with Heartflow.

Questions you are likely to be asked

Why do you want to join Heartflow?
What is your experience with Django? Tell me one thing you learned the hard way.
Tell me about yourself, and why this role is the right next step.
Tell me about a problem you solved at work that you are proud of.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager. What happened?

Prep Sarthi gives you a free mock interview: an AI interviewer asks you questions like these out loud, from your own CV and this job, and shows your score and your weakest answer.

Practise the Staff Application Database Architect at Heartflow interview free →

Heartflow is a medical technology company advancing the diagnosis and management of coronary artery disease, the #1 cause of death worldwide, using cutting-edge technology. The flagship product—an AI-driven, non-invasive cardiac test supported by the ACC/AHA Chest Pain Guidelines called the Heartflow FFRCT Analysis—provides a color-coded, 3D model of a patient’s coronary arteries indicating the impact blockages have on blood flow to the heart. Heartflow is the first AI-driven non-invasive integrated heart care solution across the CCTA pathway that helps clinicians identify stenoses in the coronary arteries (RoadMap™Analysis), assess coronary blood flow (FFRCT Analysis), and characterize and quantify coronary atherosclerosis (Plaque Analysis). Our pipeline of products is growing and so is our team; join us in helping to revolutionize precision heartcare.

Heartflow is a publicly traded company (HTFL) that has received international recognition for exceptional strides in healthcare innovation, is supported by medical societies around the world, cleared for use in the US, UK, Europe, Japan and Canada, and has been used for more than 750,000 patients worldwide.

As a Staff Application Database Architect, you will be the backend database expert behind the production applications and web services that power Heartflow's clinical and operational platform. This is a hands-on role: the majority of your time will be spent designing OLTP schemas, writing and tuning high-performance queries, and working directly inside our Python/Django services to solve real data access problems — alongside setting the architectural direction for how clinical, imaging, and operational data is structured, accessed, and governed across our AWS-based platform. Exposure to Data Lake, analytics pipelines, or AI-enablement work is a plus.

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.

Skills Needed:

You have experience in the following:

OLTP Database Engineering (Primary): Deep, hands-on expertise in relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora, or equivalent) supporting production web applications — schema design, query optimization, indexing, partitioning, replication, and HA/DR.
Application & Web Service Data Access: Strong experience building backend data layers for web applications and services in Python, with expert-level fluency in SQLAlchemy and/or the Django ORM. Deep understanding of connection pooling, caching (Redis/Memcached), transaction management, and common ORM pitfalls at scale.
Data Modeling: Expert-level conceptual, logical, and physical modeling for transactional/OLTP workloads (3NF or equivalent), including modeling for healthcare/clinical domains.
Database Engineering & DBA Leadership: Performance tuning, partitioning, indexing strategy, replication, HA/DR, and operational excellence for production relational databases.
Cloud Platforms: Building data systems in modern cloud ecosystems — AWS preferred (RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, etc.) — with a strong grasp of cost, security, and reliability tradeoffs at scale.
Healthcare Data & Compliance: Working with clinical, imaging, or device data under regulatory regimes such as FDA, HIPAA, and GDPR; familiarity with healthcare data standards (e.g., FHIR, HL7, DICOM) is a strong plus.
Technical Leadership: Mentoring senior engineers, driving cross-team architectural decisions, establishing engineering standards, and influencing technology selection across multiple teams and programs.

Nice to have (bonus, not required):

Analytics / Data Lake Exposure: Familiarity with Data Lake or lakehouse concepts (e.g., S3, Glue, Spark, Airflow) for the minor analytics-handoff portion of the role.
AI Enablement & Semantic Data: Exposure to metadata, schema registries, ontologies, or semantic layers that make data usable by AI/agentic systems.

You are passionate about:

Application-Grade Data Systems: Building rock-solid transactional databases that real clinicians and applications depend on every day.
Engineering Excellence: Championing high-quality data systems, rigorous review and testing practices, and elevating the technical baseline of the team.
Hands-On Ownership: Staying close to the code and the query plan — you'd rather fix the slow query yourself than just write a standard for it.
Constructive Collaboration: Fostering open communication across Engineering, IT, Research, and Systems Engineering, and guiding healthy technical debates that result in better outcomes.

Educational Requirements & Work Experience:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience. Master's preferred.
10+ years of relevant industry experience as a backend/application database engineer or data architect, with deep, hands-on OLTP experience supporting production web applications or web services. Data warehousing/ETL experience is a plus.

A reasonable estimate of the base salary compensation range is $190,000 to $250,000, plus bonus and equity. #LI-Hybrid

Heartflow is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to a work environment that supports, inspires, and respects all individuals and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law. This policy applies to every aspect of employment at Heartflow, including recruitment, hiring, training, relocation, promotion, and termination.

Positions posted for Heartflow are not intended for or open to third party recruiters / agencies. Submission of any unsolicited resumes for these positions will be considered to be free referrals.

Heartflow has become aware of a fraud where unknown entities are posing as Heartflow recruiters in an attempt to obtain personal information from individuals as part of our application or job offer process. Before providing any personal information to outside parties, please verify the following: A) all legitimate Heartflow recruiter email addresses end with “@heartflow.com” and B) the position described is found on our careers site at www.heartflow.com/about/careers/.

Match this job to your CV

ApplySarthi scores your CV against this role, shows the skills you are missing, and writes a tailored version for the application.

Check my match →

Similar open roles

Regional Business Manager - West Great LakesHeartflow
Territory Account Manager - Indianapolis, INHeartflow
Clinical Field Specialist, CT - TexasHeartflow
Clinical Field Specialist, CT - West FloridaHeartflow
Clinical Trial Manager - Investigator Initiated StudiesHeartflow
Customer Success ManagerHeartflow
Director, Clinical Quality & ComplianceHeartflow
Director, Customer Support Heartflow

Need answers during your interview? Try Live Sarthi.

Live Sarthi, an Interview Sarthi app, shows answer suggestions during the call.

Hidden from supported screen sharingThe overlay stays out of supported Windows screen captures.
Answers start in about 1.5 secondsResponse time varies with your connection and model.
From your own CVYour projects and your experience, not a generic script.
30 minutes freeThen ₹99 for a 2-day pass with unlimited calls — you pay for the days you are interviewing, not a subscription.

Try Live Sarthi free →

A Windows app, from the same team as ApplySarthi.

Listed on greenhouse · posted 2026-09-11. ApplySarthi collects openings and links to application pages; the role is advertised by Heartflow, not by us.