Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

We're seeking a Senior Data Engineer to lead the development and optimization of our data pipelines and reporting infrastructure. This role combines advanced data engineering with strategic business intelligence responsibilities, driving technical innovation while mentoring and leading junior engineers. The position focuses on technical leadership, stakeholder collaboration, and fostering a culture of excellence in data practices.

Who We Are

We’re an early stage, funded edtech nonprofit on a mission to eradicate illiteracy in America. Our team is composed of former educators, literacy curriculum experts, and product developers who believe it is possible to teach every child to read, and to do so at scale via research-based instruction, personalization, and technology. We center students in all decisions, in particular Black, Latino, Native American, and those experiencing poverty.

We’re building an integrated, comprehensive, tech-enabled pre-kindergarten through 8th grade reading product that students love and that rapidly moves them to foundational literacy and reading fluency. We are looking for a Head of Engineering to lead our software development efforts and build our early prototyping work to a complete PK-8 product that achieves scale, efficacy, and market success.

This is an opportunity to join as a senior leader in a mission-driven organization, working to build a breakthrough reading solution for historically underserved students.

Requirements

• Lead the transformation of ad-hoc reporting needs into automated, scalable data pipelines
• Develop and advocate for reusable reporting components using advanced engineering practices
• Establish and enforce version control for all reporting logic and transformations in Git
• Create parametrized report templates for robust self-service solutions
• Ensure rigorous documentation, testing, and continuous improvement of reporting logic
• Maintain and optimize data transformation code with application-level standards

Reporting Infrastructure

• Design and implement modular, reusable SQL and dbt models for diverse reporting patterns
• Lead the creation of automated testing frameworks for reporting logic
• Architect reproducible transformation pipelines for key business metrics
• Support and mentor team members in building flexible, reusable components
• Ensure reporting solutions adhere to GitOps practices and undergo thorough peer reviews

Business Intelligence & Reporting

• Strategically design and develop dashboards and reports for key metrics:
• Teacher engagement analytics
• Student performance tracking
• Learning progress visualization
• Operational efficiency metrics
• Oversee the creation and maintenance of automated reporting workflows
• Collaborate with stakeholders to identify strategic reporting opportunities
• Ensure enterprise-level data accuracy and consistency across reports
• Document strategic reporting logic and align with business goals
• Support complex ad-hoc analysis requests from product and business teams

A well-qualified candidate will possess the following technical skills and expertise

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, BI, or related fields
• Advanced SQL expertise for complex data analysis and transformation
• Proficiency in Python for data engineering tasks
• Extensive experience with BI tools and dashboard creation
• Deep understanding of data warehouse concepts and ETL principles
• Advanced version control with Git

A candidate will stand out if they have the following additional skills and experience, though not a hard requirement

• AWS services (Glue, Athena, ECS, Fargate), or equivalent in other major cloud offerings (Google Cloud, Azure)
• dbt for transformations
• Docker and Infrastructure as Code
• Proficiency with modern BI tools
• Experience with data governance best practices

As a senior data engineer, we expect you to foster collaboration and ownership, by reflecting the following skills

• A strategic and analytical problem-solving approach 
• Excellent communication skills, up and out (peers, stakeholders, leadership)
• Ability to translate complex business requirements into technical solutions
• Detail-oriented, especially with sensitive data (PII)
• Proactive and innovative approach to solving data challenges
• Commitment to continuous learning and professional development

Projects You'll Lead

• Driving enhanced teacher and student engagement reporting
• Leading the development of automated performance dashboards
• Designing and scaling self-service reporting tools
• Architecting metric tracking systems for operational efficiency
• Implementing advanced data quality automation frameworks
• Establishing validation frameworks and monitoring dashboards
• Optimizing pipelines for efficiency and scalability
• Ensuring data governance and consistency across reports

The Tools You’ll Use

• AWS (Glue, Spark, Athena, ECS, Fargate)
• dbt for transformations
• GitOps practices
• Infrastructure as Code
• Docker containers
• Python & SQL
• Advanced BI tools for reporting
• …and more, as we scale and grow!

What Does the First 180 Days Look Like?

Within the first 30 days...

• Onboarding with data engineering and platform peers
• Building connections with product, research, and partnerships, understanding how you’ll work with them
• Ship 1 small task to production, to get a feel for the software development lifecycle
• Work on a task, partnering with your data engineering peer
• Go through a planning cycle with product and engineering leaders
• Get a base level understanding of Magpie’s core business
• Understand how FERPA, COPPA, CCPA, NIST, and more are part of our compliance ecosystem

By day 60…

• Go through our agile-adopted approach to plan your first project (what we call “inception”)
• Map through our existing architecture, looking for opportunities to improve a process
• Lead the creation and modification of a dbt model
• Create test accounts, and go through the user experience, especially the reporting and dashboard experiences
• Propose and being to Implement one key data quality improvement

90 days in…

• Ship (or will have shipped) your first set of items through User Acceptance and Quality Assurance
• Stood up at least one ETL process for our Fall 2025 release target
• Documented data models and/or key processes in data
• Successfully lead at least 1 stakeholder reporting initiative
• Bidirectional mentorship with your data engineering peer(s)
• Participated in a bidirectional feedback session with your Engineering leadership

On day 180…

• Demonstrate a deeper understanding of our data architecture and systems
• Provide mentorship to junior team members
• Shipped value to each of your stakeholder bases - product, academic/instructional, and research
• Redesigned one key process in data engineering
• Participated in a bidirectional feedback session with your Engineering leadership
• Have visited at least one school launch in-person (if applicable and eligible)

Benefits

What You’ll Receive:

• Salary range of $145,000 - $160,000 annually
• Competitive medical, dental, vision benefits
• 401k with 4% guaranteed match
• Opportunity to work remotely for a mission-driven company full of change-makers
• Work environment that values balance and harmony with a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion
• Opportunity to travel and meet your team members in-person 2x per year

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