Head of Data

Full-time · US (Hybrid)

At Laocoön Health, we are building foundational infrastructure that makes healthcare economics more intelligent, explainable, and humane. This role is for engineers who care deeply about correctness, elegance through simplicity, and building durable, future-proofed systems - modern-day monuments that stand the test of time.

The Role

Laocoön is building the computable policy layer for provider-payer transactions. Cœus, our knowledge substrate, only works if the data underneath it is right. That's this role

You will build and own the data infrastructure that Cœus is built on. You'll turn regulatory text, payer policy, and clinical criteria into structured, queryable knowledge. You'll be the person who notices the pattern buried in a dataset before anyone thinks to look for it, and the person who builds the pipeline to make sure that pattern is never missed again. And you'll lead development of the knowledge artifact itself, because that is the backbone of everything we ship.

This is a hands-on role first. It becomes a leadership role as the team grows.

What You’ll Do

• Explore, model, and manipulate data to surface the patterns that turn raw regulatory and clinical source material into structured knowledge
• Build and own the pipelines that get that data into the graph reliably, at production scale, with real thinking about ingestion, validation, and failure modes
• Lead development of Cœus: shape the ontology, extend coverage into new regulatory and clinical domains, and make the architectural calls that determine whether the graph gets more capable over time or just gets bigger
• Direct and build teams of AI and coding agents to accelerate pipeline development and ontology extension, treating them as force multipliers you manage and QA, not shortcuts you trust blindly
• Move fluidly between data science and data engineering work, often on the same problem, without waiting for someone else to hand off the next step

You Are

• Someone who explores data the way a scientist does, and builds the pipeline the way an engineer does
• Someone who has built their own infrastructure because you needed it, not because someone assigned it to you
• Someone who can hold a federated graph architecture in your head and still reason clearly about the edge case that breaks it
• A systems thinker, not just a script writer
• Someone who wants to build and own something real, not just contribute to it

Minimum Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience across the full data lifecycle: exploration, modeling, and the engineering to pipeline it reliably
• Experience building your own data infrastructure from scratch, not just working within someone else’s
• Comfort with graph data structures and ontology design, or a track record that shows you'd pick it up fast
• Experience explaining a technical tradeoff to a non-technical (preferably clinical) audience, clearly and without hedging

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with knowledge graphs specifically, especially federated or hybrid architectures (e.g., Neo4j paired with an ontology layer)
• Exposure to healthcare regulatory or clinical policy data
• Prior experience owning a system end to end, from architecture through production
• Comfort operating in a startup where the org chart is still being written