Research Analytics Engineer

Unit: District Attorney's Transparency Analytics (DATA) Lab

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is the largest prosecutor’s office in Pennsylvania, and one of the largest in the nation. It serves more than 1.5 million citizens of the City and County of Philadelphia, employing 600 lawyers, detectives, and support staff. Our Assistant District Attorneys are dedicated to public service, public safety, and justice for all involved in the criminal justice system.

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office in particular is committed to several citywide collaborations aimed at reducing Philadelphia’s jail population and improving the criminal justice system overall.

** Please note that effective September 1, 2021, the City of Philadelphia requires all new employees to present proof of vaccination against COVID-19. **

To attain a job with the city, you must be a city of Philadelphia resident within 6 months (180 days) of hire and able to work completely in the office.

The District Attorney’s Transparency Analytics (DATA) Lab is hiring its first Research Data Engineer to join our Infrastructure team, with a special focus on supporting embedded researchers and analysts from the Penn Prosecution Lab. The DATA Lab's mission is to use data, research, and advocacy to inform policies and practices; increase equity, transparency, and accountability; and reduce harm through prosecutorial and systems reform in Philadelphia and beyond.

This unique position will work closely with our Infrastructure and Research teams and DATA Lab leadership to help align, prioritize, and solve the technical and data needs of our embedded research partners. By addressing issues infra structurally, improvements will benefit all DATA Lab personnel and numerous partners. Responsibilities include building data pipelines that extract, transform, and load data into the DATA Lab's Postgres reporting database.

The DATA Lab and Penn teams use data from the DAO, the courts, police, prisons, and other sources to inform day-to-day operations at the DAO, shape policy in the criminal legal space, support external research, and more. The technological landscape is continuously evolving, and we consistently iterate our data pipelines to provide accurate, timely data. Data pipelines are written in a combination of R and Python and feed into an AWS RDS database, using Airflow orchestration.

The Research Data Engineer will work closely with the Supervising Data Engineer, Penn team, project managers, unit leadership, data analysts, and other DAO staff. This position reports to the Supervising Data Engineer in the DATA Lab.

This is a grant-funded position for at least 2 years.

• Be part of a nationally recognized team doing innovative research and analysis of the criminal legal system from within a prosecutor’s office.
• Open the doors of the office to community members and research partners by opening unprecedented prosecution data to the public through direct data sharing, public data releases, data stories, analyses, and DAO-sponsored studies.
• Harness volumes of criminal legal data from a wide array of sources, consolidate and connect it, and produce analytical and research-ready data and documentation.
• Work in an environment free of vibe coding and develop true hand-crafted, human-created work.

• Serve as primary contact for database-related questions from Penn team (availability of a particular field or variable, how to access a database, troubleshooting server issues, etc.)
• Design, build, and maintain automated, scalable, and test-driven data pipelines.
• Build research-ready versions of datasets and documentation for Penn team and external researchers.
• Ensure quality, efficiency, and…