Data Engineer (Associate) (Remote)

Job Summary:

Niche is the leader in school search, dedicated to making researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. The Data Engineer will build and support data pipelines while ensuring data accuracy, availability, and performance, contributing to the evolution of Niche's data platform.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure data pipelines that ensure data accuracy, availability, and performance

• Develop and support data models, warehouse tables, and views for analysts and downstream applications

• Ensure observability and quality through monitoring, lineage tracking, and alerting systems

• Implement and maintain core data infrastructure and tooling (e.g., dbt Cloud, Airflow, RudderStack, cloud storage)

• Collaborate cross-functionally with analysts, engineers, and product teams to enable efficient data use

• Integrate governance and security controls such as access management and cost visibility

• Contribute to platform evolution and developer enablement through reusable frameworks, automation, and documentation

• Learn about Niche by meeting with various team members to learn more about our company through our Onboarding meetings

• Build relationships with data engineering team members, understand the day to day operating model, and stakeholders that we interact with on a daily basis

• Start to learn about our data platform infrastructure, data pipelines, source systems, and inter-dependencies

• Start participating in standups, planning, and retrospective meetings

• Start delivering on assigned sprint stories and show progress through completed tasks that contribute to team goals

• Start delivering on assigned data engineering tasks to support our day to day, and roadmap

• Start troubleshooting production issues, and participating in on-call activities

• Identify areas for improving data engineering processes, and share with the team

• Contribute consistently towards building our data platform, which includes data pipelines, and data warehouse layers

• Start to independently own workstreams whether it is periodic data engineering activities, or work items in support of our roadmap

• Deepen your understanding, and build subject matter expertise of our data & ecosystem

• Your contributions have led to us making significant progress in implementing the data platform strategy, and key data initiatives to support the company's growth

• You’ve established yourself as a key team member with subject matter expertise within data engineering

Qualifications:

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field

• 3-5 years of experience in data engineering

• Demonstrated experience of building, and supporting large scale data pipelines - streaming and batch processing

• Software engineering mindset, leading with the principles of source control, infrastructure as code, testing, modularity, automation, CI/CD, and observability

• Proficiency in Python, SQL, Snowflake, Postgres, DBT, Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka

• Knowledge and understanding of the modern data platform, and its key components - ingestion, transformation, curation, quality, governance, and delivery

• Knowledge of data modeling techniques (3NF, Dimensional, Vault)

• Self-starter, analytical problem solver, highly attentive to detail, effective communicator, and obsessed with good documentation

Preferred:

• Experience of working with Google Analytics, Marketing, Ad & Social media platform, CRM/Salesforce, and JSON data; Government datasets, and geo-spatial data will be a plus

Company:

Niche is modernizing the way students and families choose their best-fit schools and colleges, and how institutions build their future classes. Founded in 2002, the company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, with a team of 201-500 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.