Lead Data Engineer

The National Audubon Society is a nonprofit conservation organization that protects birds and the places they need, today and tomorrow. We work throughout the Americas using science, advocacy, education, and on-the-ground conservation. Audubon’s state, regional, national, and international programs, nature centers, and chapters have an unparalleled wingspan that reaches millions of people each year to inform, inspire, and unite diverse communities in conservation action. As a sentinel species, we recognize that the fate of birds is inextricably tied to the fate of us all.

Audubon has more than 700 staff working across the United States and seven countries in 17 state and regional offices, 41 nature centers, and 23 wildlife sanctuaries. Together as one Audubon, we aspire to alter the course of climate change and habitat loss, leading to healthier bird populations and reversing current trends in biodiversity loss.

Audubon is committed to a culture of workplace excellence, where our talented and diverse staff are deeply engaged, with a strong sense of belonging. The birds Audubon pledges to protect differ in color, size, behavior, geographical preference, and countless other ways. By honoring and celebrating the equally remarkable diversity of the human species, Audubon will bring new creativity, effectiveness, and leadership to our work throughout the hemisphere.

This is a remote position and reports to Director of Data Engineering, the Lead Data Engineer will be charged with implementing and enhancing data infrastructure that is core to the Data and Analytics team mission. This infrastructure is built using modern-day data tools and platforms and will support the technology strategy and services that enable data-powered work and maximize Audubon’s mission impact. Data science, analytics, geographic mapping, and business intelligence are essential to how Audubon does its work across business teams including conservation, science, advocacy, marketing, fundraising, and finance. The Data Engineering team within Audubon’s Data and Analytics group plays a key role in empowering that work and needs an engineer who will be responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that will enable this mission. As a key thought leader, this engineer will participate in guiding the team on data governance, quality and security.

They will work closely with the Director of Data Engineering to enhance and implement the strategic data platform for the National Audubon Society that will support projects such as:

• Migratory Bird Initiative, a multi-year project to track and aggregate varied data sources about migratory bird species, where they go, and the threats they face
• Integrate data from multiple sources (e.g., email, website interactions, CRM and volunteer activity, voter files, demographic data to support inclusion and equity metrics) into a data warehouse and building optimized views and workflows for analysis, reporting, and dashboard visualization
• Identify, evaluate, and implement infrastructure solutions for unified business intelligence, data warehousing, scaling and parallel processing, and machine learning
• Proactive data analysis to identify issues and implement a plan to improve the quality and integrity of operational data, particularly constituent data across data-heavy systems like Salesforce and EveryAction
• Advise on the design, build, and maintenance of structured databases to track curated data such as bird species taxonomies, bird-friendly native plants by geolocation, and important bird areas, along with product and engineering staff
• Convert raster data of predictive bird species ranges based on climate change models to vector features to enable enterprise GIS analysis and further conservation research

The key technologies currently leveraged by the Data Engineering team include: Snowflake, Fivetran, OvalEdge, Apache Airflow, Sigma, Mulesoft and ArcGIS.

Compensation:

Salary range based on geo-differentials:

$140,000 - $155,000 = NYC, San Francisco, Seattle;

$135,000 - $145,000 = Alaska, California, Connecticut, D.C., Chicago, Oyster Bay, NY

$120,000 - $135,000 = All other locations

• Contribute to the continued evolution of the data infrastructure to support the National Audubon Society mission.
• Take ownership of building and maintaining the data infrastructure, including data platforms, data pipelines, and analytical and business intelligence tools.
• Develop run books and documentation to detail all data infrastructure design and operations, including backup and recovery.
• Collaborate with the Enterprise Geographic Information Systems (GIS) team to leverage enterprise GIS and mapping technologies as part of the overall data architecture.
• Advise the Director of Data Engineering, as well as others throughout the organization, on data-related tools and platforms, data best practices for integrity, testing, and modeling, and analytical approaches.
• Collaborate with the team to ensure data quality and to advise on the design and implementation of system integrations and API services.
• Work with the Director of Data Engineering and the IT team to support data governance initiatives and to ensure the reliability and security of data services and infrastructure.
• Other job-related duties as assigned.

• At least 8 years of experience as a Data Engineer, or in similar roles, with increasing levels of responsibility.
• Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Information Technology, Data Science, Mathematics, or related quantitative field strongly preferred. Equivalent work experience will be considered.
• Significant hands-on experience building and working with data lakes, warehouses, marts, pipelines, and providing reporting or analytical services.
• Fluency in Linux-based operating systems.
• Experience with RDBM Systems and deep SQL experience.
• Experience with cloud data warehouse solutions like Snowflake, Redshift, Azure Data Warehouse, and/or BigQuery.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS EC2, S3, Lambda or equivalent services from Azure or Google).
• Experience with Linux scripting, Python, Java, Scala, .NET, R or other programming languages proven to be robust and widely used for ETL/ELT and data analytics.
• Experience with business intelligence tools (e.g., Tableau, Looker, PowerBI).
• Experience with or strong understanding of ETL/ELT and workflow tools like AWS Glue and Apache Airflow.
• Experience with or strong understanding of big data architectures and data modeling to efficiently process large volumes of data, including solutions like Spark, Hadoop, EMR, Kafka, etc.
• Experience supporting data science notebook environments such as Jupyter Hub or R Studio preferred.
• Experience building data architectures that support web application such as RESTful web services. Familiarity with web data and mapping visualization technologies such as D3.js, Plotly, ArgGIS API for JavaScript, and Leaflet a plus.
• Familiarity with machine learning/data science platforms and services like Sagemaker, Domino, TensorFlow, etc. a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical information to non-technical audiences.
  Self-starter who can work as part of a virtual team and remain motivated in a dynamic environment.
• Genuine passion for conservation and the mission of the National Audubon Society.

This position is a union eligible position and is represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

The National Audubon Society is a federal contractor and an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE). All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status. We are committed to a policy of nondiscrimination, inclusion and equal opportunity and actively seek a diverse pool of candidates in this search.

The National Audubon Society endeavors to keep our careers site accessible to any and all users.  If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please contact Accommodations@audubon.org. This contact information is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.

All new hires must be fully vaccinated prior to their start of employment unless they are pre-qualified by HR for exemption.