Senior Data Engineer, Princeton Accelerator

Senior Data Engineer, Princeton Accelerator (Contract)

Jan 27

Building the Telescope into the Information Ecosystem

The Opportunity

The Accelerator at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) is building a first-of-its-kind research platform—a living dataset of social media activity that helps researchers understand how platforms like Telegram and You Tube shape the information environment.

This is greenfield work. We're designing novel data infrastructure from scratch—solving problems without established playbooks, building systems that will define how researchers access social media data at scale.

We re looking for a senior level data engineer to expand and improve the critical data infrastructure: owning architectural decisions, tuning pipelines for performance and cost, expanding our ingestion capabilities (transcripts, sampled media, ML-ready datasets), and establishing engineering standards.

The datasets you help build will accelerate research on pressing social science topics relevant to the social media space that shapes our collective information ecosystem.

The Work

Pipeline Performance & Expansion

Optimize existing Databricks pipelines for cost and performance (we re a lean research operation and DBU-conscious)

Expand ingestion scope:
You Tube transcripts, multi-media sampling, new metadata sources

Design for ML readiness—researchers and data scientists need gold-layer datasets they can query and model against

Standardize our CI/CD pipelines and integrate them into the product workflow

Establish patterns for testing, deployment, and monitoring that the team can sustain

Document what you build so it outlasts your engagement

Team & Researcher Support

Work alongside a small engineering team—your experience and mentorship matter

Collaborate with researchers to understand what they need from the data

Communicate clearly; we value engineers who can translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders

What We re Looking For

Technical leader who can own architectural decisions

You've designed and built pipelines at scale (10+ TB).

Deep experience with CI/CD, testing, and what "maintainable" actually means

Clear communicator who can work with researchers and junior engineers alike

Experience with social media data, APIs, or unstructured text at scale

Background in research or academic environments

Interest in the societal impact of your engineering work

Azure, Git Hub Actions experience

Structure

~30 hours/week, January through June 2026

Remote; engineering and product team Atlanta, GA area, with research and operations in Princeton, NJ

Reports to Director of Engineering

Competitive rate commensurate with experience.

To Apply

Formal proposals not required, just send the following:

Your resume (2 pages max, please)

A few sentences on why this interests you

One example of a pipeline or system you re proud of building. A link to a Git Hub repo or website would be great.