About the Role
The Economic Mobility Center is building the data infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet in education — a longitudinal student record system that tracks outcomes from high school through workforce entry across institutional boundaries, with a privacy and accountability architecture that makes it trustworthy enough for widespread regional adoption. This Regional Data Hub will improve how education and workforce systems connect, share data, and support student outcomes across a region.
We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design and manage the data infrastructure that powers this work. This role sits at the intersection of education data policy and production data engineering. This expert will be responsible for building reliable, scalable data pipelines and systems that enable high-quality analytics, insights, reporting, and decision-making across the enterprise and the regions we serve.
This is a backend engineering role focused on data pipelines, data modeling foundations, and system reliability. You will report to the VP Data and work closely with Product, Analytics, and Technical teams to ensure data is accessible, trustworthy, and aligned to real-world use cases.
What You’ll Do
Build and Own Data Pipelines
- Design, develop, and maintain data pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and delivering data across multiple sources (e.g., education systems, workforce data, internal platforms)
- Manage pipeline orchestration including scheduling, monitoring, and failure handling
- Support both batch and near real-time data ingestion where appropriate
Define Data Structure & Standards
- Establish and maintain data schemas, file structures, and ingestion standards
- Ensure consistency across datasets to support scalable integration and reuse
- Partner with implementation teams to enable standardized onboarding of partner data
Enable Analytics and Reporting
- Prepare and optimize data for downstream use by Data Analysts
- Support development of clean, reliable datasets for dashboards, reporting, and research
- Improve performance and usability of the data environment
Ensure Data Quality & Reliability
- Implement automated data quality checks and monitoring
- Identify, troubleshoot, and resolve data issues across pipelines
- Contribute to a culture of high data trust across the organization
Support Data Governance & Operations
- Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure data is handled responsibly and in alignment with privacy requirements (e.g., FERPA)
- Contribute to the implementation of a governance-aware data architecture, ensuring data pipelines validate against data sharing agreements and support transparent, auditable access to sensitive data
- Contribute to documentation and data cataloging efforts
- Support planning and execution of annual data calendar ingestion and monitoring
What We’re Looking For
You are a backend-oriented data engineer who is comfortable working with complex, imperfect data and building systems that make it usable and reliable.
You likely:
- Have experience working with real-world data pipelines, not just clean datasets
- Understand the challenges of integrating data across systems and organizations
- Can balance strong technical execution with practical constraints in a mission-driven environment
Qualifications
Required
- 4+ years of experience in data engineering or a related role
- Strong experience building and managing ETL/ELT pipelines (Python preferred)
- Proficiency in SQL and experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)
- Experience with data transformation tools (e.g., dbt or similar)
- Familiarity with cloud-based data environments (e.g., AWS, Snowflake, BigQuery)
- Familiarity with modern data governance architectures, including approaches to enforcing data sharing agreements in code, maintaining auditable access logs, and supporting privacy-preserving data access in regulated environments (e.g., FERPA)
- Experience implementing data validation and monitoring practices
Preferred
- Experience working with education or workforce data systems (e.g., K-12, higher ed, or state data)
- Familiarity with data orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Dagster)
- Experience supporting analytics or BI teams
- Understanding of data privacy and governance requirements in regulated environments
Why This Role Matters
The Regional Data Hub depends on reliable, well-structured data to deliver meaningful insights and improve outcomes for students and communities. This role is foundational to ensuring that data can be trusted, shared responsibly, and used effectively across partners.
About Us
The Economic Mobility Center (EMC) is a nonprofit organization advancing regional economic mobility by ensuring every learner has a clear pathway to a living wage while meeting regional workforce needs. We collaborate with K-12, higher education, community, and workforce leaders to develop Regional Talent Networks to: Align Pathways, Guide Students, Simplify Systems, Sustain Funding.