COSMOS - Data Engineer II

Type of Position: Professional Staff - Project/Program Administration

Job Type: Regular

Workstudy Position: No

Sponsorship Available: No

Institution Name: University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Department: COSMOS

Summary of

Job Duties:

The Project/Program Specialist (Data Engineer II) position is a full-time provisional with the COSMOS Research Center and is funded through a grant or contract. The appointment is contingent upon continued grant funding and satisfactory job performance. The Specialist will collect, manage, and convert raw data into usable information for analytics and decision-making. Responsibilities include developing and maintaining datasets, improving data quality and efficiency through data systems and pipelines, interpreting trends and patterns, creating complex data reports, building algorithms and prototypes, leading the development of social media data collection pipelines and inference methods, and collaborating with researchers and developers at the COSMOS research center and partner organizations to achieve performance metrics across various projects.

Reporting to:
Dr. Nitin Agarwal (nxagarwal)

• The candidate must have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Science, or a related discipline.
• The candidate must have 1+ years of experience as a data engineer, software developer, software engineer, database administrator, or other similar roles.
• Having a Master’s or Ph.D. degree is a plus.

• Collecting and analyzing raw data from various sources, including social media platforms.
• Organize and maintain datasets.
• Improving data quality and efficiency.
• Design and manage data pipelines that encompass the journey of data from source to destination systems.
• Set up and manage the infrastructure required for ingestion, processing, and storage of data.
• Evaluate the model needs and objectives.
• Interpret trends and patterns of data.
• Conduct complex data analysis and report on results.
• Prepare data for analysis and reporting by transforming and cleansing it.
• Combine raw information from different sources.
• Explore ways to enhance data quality and reliability.
• Identify opportunities for data acquisition.
• Develop analytical tools and programs.
• Collaborate with teams at COSMOS on several projects.
• Managing services and operational infrastructure for system reliability and resiliency.
• Creating continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for automating service/system deployment.
• Front‑end development (HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, etc.).
• Training machine learning (ML) models on datasets.
• Deploying machine learning (ML) models.
• Enhance the system’s fault tolerance by incorporating alert mechanisms.
• Work on other tasks as asked.

• Intermediate proficiency level in working with data models, data pipelines, ETL processes, data stores, data mining, and segmentation techniques.
• Intermediate proficiency level in working with programming/scripting languages (e.g., Java and Python).
• Intermediate proficiency level in working with data integration platforms and SQL database design.
• Intermediate proficiency level in working with numerical, analytical, and data security skills.
• Intermediate proficiency level in collecting raw data from various social media platforms.
• Intermediate proficiency level in creating CI/CD pipelines.
• Intermediate proficiency level with front‑end development (HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, etc.).
• Intermediate proficiency level with training and deploying machine learning (ML) models on datasets.

Criminal Background Check, Sex Offender Registry. Background checks include a criminal background check and a sex offender registry check. For certain positions, there may also be a financial (credit) background check, a Motor Vehicle Registry (MVR) check, and/or drug screening.

Background checks are used in a confidential, non-discriminatory manner consistent with state and federal law.

The University of Arkansas is an equal opportunity institution. The University does not discriminate in its education programs or activities (including in admission and employment) on the basis of…