Staff Data Engineer

Position Description:

The Staff Data Engineer builds automated data pipelines while maintaining a reliable, secure, and well-structured data warehouse that can support analytics for General Assembly’s global team. This role sits on the global Data team and reports to the Director of Data Engineering.

The data team is not only responsible for making sure that GA’s data solutions are efficient, intelligent, user-friendly, and accessible to employees across the organization, but also works closely with GA’s leadership team, providing them with data-driven insights that drive greater business performance and strategy. The data team includes a data engineering team (director of data engineering, senior data engineer, and a data engineer), an analytics team (Manager of Data Analytics, 4 senior analysts, and an associate analyst), a VP of Data, and a senior technical product manager. Our data technology stack includes Redshift, Python, SQL, Tableau, and Stitch Data.

Candidates should have advanced problem solving skills, be highly organized, and understand data from multiple perspectives. Strong candidates will have experience adapting to the evolving needs of a high-growth B2C and B2B business and creating pragmatic and innovative solutions to complex business problems.

Responsibilities:

• Using SQL, Python, and other tools and APIs as necessary, automate the flow of data from user-facing applications to GA’s data warehouse. Set best practices for data automation, including code styling, review and testing processes, and documentation.


• Optimize data structures and processes for efficiency relative to business needs, including performance optimization or parallelization of data pipelines to meet data refresh requirements and table optimization for faster query performance.


• Automate data acquisition from a variety of third-party platforms, through point-and-click ETL tools like FiveTran or through custom API connections.


• Set best practices for and implement continuous integration and deployment on new repositories; develop and maintain testing, monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting systems for data platforms.


• Lead tooling discovery for new data platforms; represent data engineering in discovery for user-facing tools.


• Own documentation for data structures and data lineage that enable easier troubleshooting and understanding of analytics.


• Collaborate with information security, legal, and privacy teams to ensure regulatory compliance of our data pipelines and storage with varying global requirements.


• Partner with business intelligence analysts and analytics engineers to identify instabilities and opportunities for optimization in the data warehouse. 


• Represent data engineering in enterprise architecture conversations.


• Partner with your team to set and maintain best practices for data pipelines and maintenance of the data warehouse; mentor and collaborate with more junior engineers on the team.


• Participate in on-call rotation.

Qualifications:

• 8 years of experience in data or software roles, with at least 5 in data engineering.


• Expert in end-to-end data workflows, from data collection to analysis and presentation, with most expertise in data pipelines and modeling.


• Expert proficiency in SQL (Redshift / Postgres preferred).


• Advanced Python scripting skills; knowledge of data parallelization and Spark preferred.


• Experience managing cloud *nix platforms from the command line; confidence in devops practices and scripting.


• Knowledge of version control (Github), automated deployment (AWS Code Deploy), and monitoring/alerting, and confidence in implementing tools and practices for more reliable and efficient data engineering work.


• Experience with AWS data and software engineering tools; experience with SQL optimization for a columnar database like Redshift. AWS Certification preferred.


• Experience with BI tools such as Looker or Tableau. Tableau experience preferred.


• Experience with DBT preferred.


• Strong communication and documentation skills; ability to translate complex technical topics for a non-technical audience.


• Comfortable working in Jira on an agile team; experience as a player/coach scrum master within your team is a plus.


• Comfortable finding and validating data in undocumented systems.


• Energized by our mission of transforming people’s lives and careers through experiential education.

The anticipated annualized salary range for this position in the US market is $110,000 and $160,000. Salary will be determined based on experience, education, geographic location, and other factors.  If hired as a regular full-time employee, this position will include a variable compensation plan which could be a bonus or a commission.
 
US benefit offerings for full-time employment may include medical, dental, vision, term life insurance, short-term and long-term disability, additional voluntary benefits, commuter benefits, wellness plans & reimbursement and retirement programs. Available paid leave may include paid time off, parental leave and holiday pay.

The salary range published in this job posting is for US based locations only. Non-US based candidates interested in this position can email [email protected] for country specific pay range details and benefits offered.