Analytics Engineer

Position Summary

The Voter Participation Center (VPC) is the nation’s largest non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to registering and mobilizing voters from the New American Majority (NAM) – people of color, unmarried women and young people – who make up the majority of the potential electorate but have been historically underrepresented in political participation and power. Using direct mail, digital and social media outreach, guided by rigorous data science and experimentation, and working closely with a multitude of partner organizations, VPC connects with millions of voters each year, building the foundation for amore representative democracy. Over 17 years VPC has helped more than 5.6 million people register to vote. In 2020, as COVID-19 shut down most forms of in-person voter contact, VPC helped more than 4.6 million people apply to vote by mail & cast ballots, registered more than 1.6 million people, and assisted millions of voters in voting early and safely to reduce pressures on polling places onElection Day.VPC programs are flexible, nimble and scalable. VPC is driven by a commitment to constant research, testing, experimentation and evaluation, and thus offers many of the most cost effective, proven, high-impact programs in the civic engagement field. The Center for Voter Information (CVI) is VPC’s partner organization, and is a separate but affiliated 501(c)4 non-profit that works to engage both the NAM as well as members of the broader electorate who share their values.

Position Overview

VPC and CVI seek an Analytics Engineer to build a new data and analytics platform. This person will have extensive experience in software engineering, at all stages of the development lifecycle. They will contribute to the design, development and testing of software tools for data transfer, analytics, and reporting, as well as to the evaluation of vendor tools and services. The candidate will be joining a team that is responsible for bringing many of VPC andCVI’s pipelines, integrations and data tools in-house. The analytics engineer will be expected to communicate extensively with stakeholders and exercise sound judgement in the design and implementation of these systems. An ideal candidate may have built and deployed their own ETL pipeline, and will bring previous experience with automation toolchains and modern deployment infrastructure to the team. Experience with cloud platforms is helpful but not required. This role could be based out of our Washington DC office or remote.

Primary Responsibilities
Responsibilities Include, but are not limited to:

• Designing and implementing data pipelines in SQL and Python
• Maintaining data models across a wide variety of data sources
• Creating best practices for data standardization and refinement
• Mentoring team members in software engineering best practices
• Working as part of a team to maintain a well documented, consistent codebase
• Communicating with teammates and vendors outside of the analytics team and translating their needs into code
• Striving for data practices that include traditionally underrepresented groups in our programs even when faced with potentially biased incoming data sources

Skills and Qualifications
The ideal candidate will have:

• Exceptionally strong communications skills
• 4+ years of experience in a software engineering role○or a bachelor’s degree and 2+ years of experience○or an advanced degree and 1+ years experience
• Deep experience in Python
• Previous work with SQL
• Comfortability developing in, and for, a POSIX-compliant (Unix-like) environment

Nice-To-Haves:

• Previous experience with data in politics
• Previous experience in civic engagement, organizing or political campaigns
• Experience taking a software system from design all the way to deployment and maintenance
• Deep experience in at least one of the following: Ansible, Chef, Docker, Puppet,Terraform, or equivalent code-as-infrastructure tool

The salary range for this position is $90,000-$100,000. This is a full-time position. VPC and CVI offer an excellent benefits package, including 100% coverage of healthcare premiums.