Job Description

About Acacia Center for Justice: The objective of the Acacia Center for Justice ("Acacia") is to expand on Vera's work over the past twenty years in providing legal support and representation to immigrants facing deportation through the development, coordination, and management of national networks of legal services providers serving immigrants across the country. Acacia's goals are twofold: to support immigrant legal services and defense networks to provide exceptional legal services to immigrants and to advocate for the expansion of these programs and the infrastructure critical to guaranteeing immigrants access to justice, fairness, and freedom. Acacia will focus the collective power of both Vera and CAIR on delivering accountable, independent, zealous, and person-centered legal services and representation to protect the rights of all immigrants at risk of deportation. Job Summary: The Data Engineer will be a member of Acacia's Research Evaluation and Data Analytics (REDA) team. They will provide technical and analytical support to the Director of Data Systems and Analytics and the Director of Research and Evaluation for Acacia's evolving reporting and research agenda. To achieve this, the Data Engineer will be responsible for building out the data infrastructure for the suite of six immigration legal orientation and representation programs that Acacia administers in partnership with the Legal Access Program of the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). This work involves managing and enhancing data inputs and architecture for EOIR program databases, as well as the AWS analytic environment that houses the databases, and helping to streamline and improve the ingestion and transformation of data from both internal and external sources. The Data Engineer will also work to develop solutions that allow Acacia staff and subcontractors to securely access, manipulate, and transmit data in support of program delivery, administration, mandatory reporting, and research and evaluation work. The Data Engineer will also collaborate with the Managing Director of IT on data security solutions and work with the external vendors responsible for developing and maintaining our database. Primary Duties/Responsibilities: Create and support systems and processes for collecting, compiling, manipulating, and analyzing data to support Acacia's program and research, which includes: * Working with the Acacia Research Evaluation and Data Analytics (REDA) team and program management staff to identify and solve data ingestion, migration, management, and integration challenges. * Designing data models and setting up data environments to support reporting and analysis. * Building and testing data ingestion, migration, and ETL/ELT processes. * Automating processes and scheduling jobs within the data environment. * Writing documentation of systems and processes for collaboration within REDA and with program management staff. * Partner with REDA team members to provide coding support, conduct code reviews, and apply software engineering best practices for data security. * Partner with REDA team members to generate mandatory and ad hoc reports for EOIR program work. * Provide technical support for EOIR program databases (including data quality management, working with IT subcontractors to improve the system logic of database functions, and assisting with database trainings and database technical support for end-users). * Ensure data ecosystems are security compliant and properly integrated with Acacia's IT systems where applicable. * Work closely with IT to ensure compliance and integration of systems. Required Skills, Knowledge, Abilities: * Bachelor's Degree or equivalent and/or certification in data engineering, analytics, data science or another relevant field (machine learning, IT systems, etc.) * 2+ years of full-time experience in a data engineering capacity. * 2+ years data analytics experience (including data cleaning and framing, generating reports, data visualizations, writing code and code review) * Experience collaborating directly with data scientists and data analysts who develop analyses in any combination of R, Python, SQL, Tableau, Stata, etc. preferred. * Working knowledge of AWS data product ecosystem. * Prior experience designing and developing data models, building out and testing ETL data pipelines, and automating scheduled workflows using technologies including Github Actions, SQL & Python. * Fluency in collaborating with Git & Github, with dedication to using these tools to conduct peer code reviews and uphold coding standards. * High comfort level with ingesting messy source datasets that are prone to manual data entry errors and integrating these into a live database. * Ability to build repeatable and well-documented processes and tools that can be used by other research & analytics team members, regardless of the languages they use to perform their analyses. * Excellent oral and written communication skil