Data Lead

Work. Serve. Thrive. With the City of Durham
Advance in your career while making a real difference in the community you serve.

Hiring Range: $85,654.40 - $ (Salaries are determined based upon your education and/or relevant certifications and work experience)
Schedule/Shift: Monday-Friday 9am-5pm. Temporary with benefits, 40 hours per week.

*** Temporary Position, may become eligible for Full-time hire in July 2026.

In 2022, the Durham Community Safety Department (DCSD) launched four 911 crisis response programs—collectively known as HEART (Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams). Please visit our website and dashboard, watch this CNN clip, listen to this NPR segment, or read this piece from The Assembly. In 2025, DCSD has added a new division focused on Stabilization Services. This expansion represents an exciting new phase in DCSD’s development—and a thrilling opportunity to pair alternative response programs with stabilization services that can better support Neighbors.

In 2025, DCSD’s scope of work grew to include several other dimensions of community safety. Importantly, DCSD became the lead agency of Durham’s Continuum of Care, and incorporated the City’s homelessness system team into its department. That team, now known as the HOPE Team (Housing Opportunities and Pathways Engagement Team), supports the local continuum of care, homelessness providers, and neighbors experiencing homelessness.

Its purpose is to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring in Durham. In data terms: to reach functional zero across populations experiencing homelessness.

As a member of the HOPE Team, the Data Lead will partner with the current team to take joint ownership of the HOPE team’s data‑related processes—and lead us in developing and using innovative evaluations, practices, and tools. The Data Lead will respond to time‑sensitive and high‑level requests for data related to the Strategic Framework to Prevent and End Homelessness. The Data Lead will also socialize data definitions, developing a shared vision for quality data, establishing reporting policies and procedures to ensure timely and clean data, and producing products that facilitate data‑driven decision making.

It will be critical that the Data Lead is one of the community’s most ardent data evangelist and promotes the importance of creating and using data for continuous quality improvement methods and system change efforts.

• Refine HOPE team’s data strategy by examining gaps, opportunities, and best practice from other cities.
• Manages high‑leverage projects and reports that are time‑sensitive and essential to the Strategic Framework to Prevent and End Homelessness.
• Presents major findings to key stakeholder groups inclusive of City leaders, homelessness providers, partners in other sectors, and the public at large.
• Ensures the by‑name dataset is accurate, timely, and comprehensive by creating data insights and developing policies and procedures.
• Designs programmatic evaluations that reveal focus areas leading to robust conversations on areas of improvement.
• Collaborate with the HOPE team to review strategic planning towards system‑level problems.
• Develops internal data tools that supports staff in efficiently processing the data to better understand their work towards key measures.
• Problem‑solves data issues from a systems perspective by leveraging their knowledge of HMIS to identify trends or anomalies in data.
• Informs policies and procedures to clear the path for stronger data infrastructure (i.e. developing reporting SOPs, data sharing agreements, and community‑wide data norms).
• Evangelizes the use of data for improvement, advocacy, and storytelling through demonstrating the impact towards client outcomes, incorporating data into internal and external communications, and being an advocate for measurable improvements.
• Engages with Built for Zero to develop a strong understanding of quality data definitions, to learn from other data leads, and to support others in the sector.
• Analyzes data and produces data products including monthly inflow/outflow reports and Built for Zero metrics to support data‑informed decision making and to…