Data Engineer/Analytics Engineer

Education Analytics strives to deliver sophisticated, research-informed analytics to educators and school administrators to support their work in improving student outcomes. To support them best, the data they receive must be accurate, up to date, secure, and easily accessible. The person in this role will be a critical team member who helps to make that a reality.

We are seeking a full-time Data Engineer or Analytics Engineer to lead the design, build, and maintenance of automated data pipelines and analytic systems. An ideal candidate has strong SQL skills and experience with data warehousing concepts, familiarity with complex data integration and/or analysis, and an interest in improving K-12 education.

This role supports the timely delivery of data and analytics to educators and administrators who use this data to drive change and improvement in education. We are looking for candidates who are innovative, hard-working, and curious to help us continue to develop our team's capacity in the development and use of cutting-edge tools. Our team is consistently evaluating tools for new projects and looking for the best tools for the job. Our current stack uses an ELT approach via Apache Airflow and dbt to create data warehouses in Snowflake or Postgres, depending on the scale of the data. These blog posts on our website illustrate some projects our team might work on.

• https://www.edanalytics.org/blog/building-a-multi-source-analytics-database-to-support-teachers-during-covid-19

• https://www.edanalytics.org/blog/turning-public-data-into-custom-insights-how-ea-has-built-a-public-data-platform-for-our-partners

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of data warehousing structures for research, analytics, and reporting/dashboarding

• Apply best practices from software engineering to data pipelines

• Help implement code testing, continuous integration, and deployment strategies to ensure system reliability

• Design and implement complex pipelines to integrate data coming from a mix of APIs, flat files, or other database sources

• Develop and improve internal tools and systems to efficiently deliver high-quality, actionable metrics

• Work collaboratively within a team of analysts, school system leaders, and other engineers to create analytics solutions that are scalable, easy to

maintain, and support high quality research

• Explore and apply new cutting-edge tools to drive innovation across a variety of projects

Qualifications

• Experience architecting data warehouse and data lake structures that are intuitive and performant

• Knowledge of best design practices in modern cloud-based data warehouses

• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining modern ELT pipelines

with a clean code-base

• Fluency in SQL, experience with Python and Linux.

• Knowledge of software engineering best practices, particularly in team-based development using Git

• Ability to be proactive in identifying and defending against potential data quality & processing issues

Bonus Skills:

• Experience with cloud-based columnar data warehouses (Snowflake, RedShift, BigQuery)

• Experience with Data Build Tool (dbt)

• Experience with Apache Airflow, or other modern data pipeline systems

• Familiarity with AWS tooling and best practices

• Desire to work with cutting edge tools in a fast-paced environment

Hiring Process

1. Hiring managers review resumes

2. Selected candidates invited to 30-minute interview with Data Engineering team managers to discuss skills and experience alignment

3. Selected candidates invited for full day final interview. Candidates are sent a skills exercise in advance that will be discussed in the interview. This doesn't require any coding, it's about concepts and planning of data systems, and doesn't require any pre-submitted work. In addition to discussing the exercise, there will be another approximately 2 hours of interviews to meet other Data Engineering team members and key members of other teams and to help candidates learn more about Education Analytics & the role.

How you will successfully onboard in this role

In your first few weeks, you will work through a training exercise our team has developed that familiarizes our new hires with our development setup & tooling, and join team meetings and 1-1 check-ins. From there, you will likely work on 1-2 projects and begin joining project meetings to gain familiarity with the context of the work we do. Next you will start to take on smaller tasks in those projects, and by 3-6 months in, begin to take the lead on larger initiatives.

Additional details

The weekly hour expectation is 45 hours per week, and nights and weekends are sometimes required. Our preference is for candidates to primarily work from EA's office in Madison, WI.

About us: Education Analytics is a non-profit organization that uses data analysis to inform education policy decisions. We work with school districts, regional offices of education, non-profits, and policymakers to identify ways to make education systems better.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary

• Annual merit bonuses

• Paid holidays and one month of paid vacation per year

• Generous 401k and health benefits

• Parental leave benefit of up to 26 weeks of paid leave

• Free Madison Metro transit pass or subsidized office parking

• Casual office environment

• Location right in the heart of downtown Madison, WI

Education Analytics is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.