Data/Analytics Engineer

The Philadelphia Inquirer is a public benefit corporation owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Together, we’re at the center of a critical mission to create a lasting future for ambitious, engaging, and useful local journalism. We’re doing this, in part, by deepening our connection with the communities we serve. Our integrated digital and print platforms are the Philadelphia region’s largest media network. We’re passionate about building a sustainable model for indispensable local journalism, and we take pride in finding diverse, dynamic, and talented individuals to help push our team forward.

Summary

The Data Engineer will focus on modernizing, building out and maintaining our data technology infrastructure and processes.  As part of the Product, Data & Engineering team, you will operationalize our data strategy, ensure quality and accuracy of data and data models, reporting & downstream data products, and create and manage AI/ML operations such as model development and training, model validation and deployment.

The Data Engineer will use  software engineering best practices, follow an iterative approach with regular user feedback, and work with the agile practitioner to prioritize work and manage multiple deployments per day. The role is a unique opportunity to create and shape the technology, methods and data related processes.

What You’ll Do

• Continuously iterate and improve upon our data platform, enabling business decisions, activation and AI/ML processes through high-quality, trustworthy data.

• Collaborate directly with a group of talented and mission-driven professionals, including data engineers, data analysts, agile practitioners, and product managers.

• Own the development, testing, documentation and evangelism of our core data models.

• Develop and maintain efficient and scalable data pipeline architecture for collecting data across a variety of sources, enabling different functions to leverage transformed data for analytics and operations.

• Evaluate, engineer, and operationalize tooling and processes to enhance development workflows.

• Work with modern data and cloud technologies, including dbt Cloud, Airflow, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and BigQuery.

• Contribute to the open source data community by maintaining several public code repositories.

• Help ensure the success and longevity of local journalism in the Philadelphia region.

Who we are Looking for

• 3+ years hands-on experience in analytics and/or data engineering

• Intellectually curious, intrinsically motivated with a bias toward action

• An entrepreneurial mindset that is focused on stakeholder results

• Ability to work independently and asynchronously in a hybrid work environment. Excellent written communication skills.

• Professional experience with dbt, Airflow, Python, GitHub, and Terraform

• Experience developing code in a collaborative environment. Able to comfortably use git and give thoughtful PR reviews

• Proficient in interacting with RESTful APIs, including capturing, cleansing, and storing web responses

• Working knowledge of CI/CD practices

• Experience with cloud data warehouses (e.g. BigQuery, Snowflake), including cost optimization strategies such as partitioning and clustering

• Advanced SQL skills including use of analytic window functions and modular query design

• Knowledge of strategies and tooling to monitor and enforce data quality standards

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform

• Contextual knowledge of services such as Google Analytics 360/4, Auth0, Salesforce CRM, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud

• Experience writing scripts to automate the provisioning and maintenance of systems in a distributed, virtualized infrastructure; familiarity with containerized application development

• Hands-on experience with one or more of the following: AI/ML processes to including data labeling, model development and training, model validation, and model deployment

• Familiarity with managed cloud-based options for building machine learning models

• Working knowledge of statistics is a plus