Data Engineer - Transfer Explorer

ITHAKA’s mission is to expand access to knowledge and education around the world. Our services — Artstor, JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R — enable people everywhere to learn, to grow, and to overcome barriers to education. In carrying out our mission, as employees we feel a deep responsibility to members of our community and to each other, and we are committed to building and sustaining a culture where everyone can thrive.

The Role

ITHAKA is looking for a Data Engineer to join the JSTOR Labs team  Data Engineer, you will have a pivotal role in building the Transfer Explorer pilot application. The Transfer Explorer is a collaboration between Ithaka S+R and JSTOR Labs which aims to make it easy for students, school administrators, and advisors to see how earned credits and prior learning experiences will transfer and count toward a degree at a new institution.

Building on a concept initially piloted at City University of New York, the team is now creating a universal version of the tool that will be able to help students everywhere.

The Data Engineer will work with backend and frontend engineering specialists, UX researchers, and field‑leading subject matter experts within Ithaka S+R to build the best possible Transfer Explorer experience for data providers and student users alike. You will collaborate with our product owner, fellow engineers, and our data integration partners at the DXtera Institute to build flexible, reliable, and replicable pipelines and validation tooling for rapidly ingesting and searching data from the student information systems of Transfer Explorer partner institutions.

You will also work with policy and product researchers to use insights from institutional and usage data to play a role in deciding larger product features, strategy, and goals.

The Data Engineer will report to the JSTOR Labs’ Manager of Engineering and join a dynamic and creative team of engineers, UX researchers, and business strategists incubating a variety of novel products. Our engineers play an active role in contributing technical know‑how and domain experience into shaping Labs’ new initiatives. Other work may include rapid prototyping sprints pairing with our team and outside partners, or rotating onto growing projects as they mature.

As a member of the larger engineering organization within ITHAKA, you will have the chance to learn from experts in software and data engineering, machine learning, and systems architecture working on the leading‑edge technology stack used by the JSTOR platform, and be able to have a large impact on the worldwide community that ITHAKA serves.

Responsibilities

As part of the Transfer Explorer team, you will:

• Learn the landscape of higher education student information systems and the data needs of our student‑facing applications.
• Develop documentation and automated tooling to help onboarding new institutional partners into the program, validating their existing data, identifying needed enhancements, and speeding institutional adoption of the Transfer Explorer tool.
• Leverage ITHAKA’s enterprise‑level data, logging, and analytics solutions via AWS and Databricks to combine institutional data with application usage data in ways that support user experience research as well as domain research by Ithaka S+R.

Experience and Skills

Required

• 2‑3 years experience building robust data ingestion and validation pipelines that feed heterogeneous data into relational databases such as Postgres, MySQL, or Oracle.
• Advanced proficiency with SQL.
• Experience with data warehouse / data analytics solutions such as Spark, Databricks, or Redshift.
• Ability to work as a close and empathetic collaborator across a multifunctional team including backend developers, UX designers, product managers, and subject‑matter experts.
• Commitment to our organizational values of belonging, evidence, speed, teamwork, and trust.

The preferred experience or skills listed below are valuable, but ITHAKA encourages candidates to apply if they possess the required skills, even if they do not have the specific experience or skills listed below.

• Familiarity with the higher education sector and student information systems; working…