Data Engineer

Education Analytics is a non-profit organization that strives to deliver sophisticated, research-informed analytics to educators and school administrators to support their work in improving student outcomes. Data Engineers at EA enable this mission by ensuring that the data educators receive is accurate, up to date, secure, and easily accessible.

We are seeking a full-time Data Engineer or Analytics Engineer to join our Engineering team focused on Data & Partners. Candidates for this role may be hired at a Data Engineer II or Senior Data Engineer level depending on skills and experience. The person in this role will design, build, and maintain automated data pipelines and analytic systems for our partner education agencies. This will involve working directly on partner education agency projects to build data systems using EA’s tools, and use the experience of building real systems to advise and contribute to core product development.

An ideal candidate has strong SQL skills, experience with data warehousing concepts, and familiarity with complex data integration work. Data engineers are responsible for extract/load processes, data warehouse design, data transformations, and data modeling. While we want our team members to have familiarity with all aspects of ELT, we welcome specialists who may be more experienced on either the data engineering or analytics engineering side. Our typical stack uses an ELT approach via Apache Airflow and dbt to create data warehouses in Snowflake and Databricks.

Our team is working to change the education sector by building frameworks to enable collaboration across school systems. To do this, we use open data standards and open-source tools so that solutions we create can be used and re-used in different education agencies across the country. We build and maintain the Enable Data Union project and open-source projects like Earthmover. Our team’s work includes building tools and creating and managing data systems using those tools.

This sampling of posts from the Education Analytics blog provides some insight into the role:

• What we’ve learned building AI on top of Education Data
• A day in the life of a Data Engineer with Ryan Aguilar
• A day in the life of a Data Engineer with Angelica Lastra
• Building Shared Data Infrastructure for Public Education

Qualifications

• 2+ years experience designing data pipelines, systems, and warehouses
• Knowledge of best design practices in cloud-based data warehouses
• Knowledge of software engineering practices, particularly in team-based development using Git
• Fluency in SQL and experience working with real world data
• Experience with Python
• Experience with Linux
• Experience with database administration, security, and management

Skills and experience that make you a particularly good fit:

• Experience with cloud-based columnar data warehouses and other cloud data technologies (Snowflake, RedShift, Databricks, Fabric, BigQuery)
• Experience working in environments with strict data security requirements
• Experience with dbt
• Experience with Apache Airflow
• Familiarity with AWS tooling and best practices
• Experience with education data, and the Ed-Fi data standard in particular
• Experience and interest in using AI code tools as part of development and automation workflows

Hiring Process

1. Hiring team reviews applications
2. Selected candidates are invited to submit an asynchronous video interview
3. Selected candidates move on to a second round, which may involve a live remote technical skills assessment
4. Selected candidates are invited for a full day final interview (in person in our downtown Madison office). There will be another approximately 2-3 hours of interviews to meet 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

• First 30 days: Work through organizational and team onboarding. Get situated into team meetings and one on ones with your manager. Complete a training exercise that familiarizes our new hires with our development setup and tooling.
• First 60 days: Begin to get involved in your first projects, familiarizing yourself with the project history, context, and goals by joining project meetings and connecting with teammates. Continue familiarizing yourself with our team’s workflow processes and tools.
• First 90 days: Now fully integrated into your first projects, making regular code and documentation contributions. You may start sharing your development at team meetings. We will start planning for you to take a lead role on sub-tasks within a project.

Additional details

The weekly expectation is 45 hours per week, and nights and weekends are sometimes required. Our office is in Madison, WI and applicants who live in the area, or are interested in moving here, can work in the office alongside other members of the team. Currently, our engineers include a mix of people who are working from office, hybrid, and fully remote. We are open to remote or on-site candidates for this position.

Benefits:

• 9 annual paid holidays, 26.5 days of paid vacation per year, and paid sick time
• 12% employer 401k contribution + 3% match
• Generous health benefits
• Parental leave benefit of up to 26 weeks of paid leave
• Free Madison Metro transit pass or subsidized office parking (for in person employees)
• 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.