Description
Data Engineer
Location: Flexible within the U.S.
Experience: Significant software engineering experience — finding data, structuring it, and building tools that inform and empower the public.
Please visit our page to apply: https://energyandpolicy.org/data-engineer/
Summary: The Energy and Policy Institute is seeking a new team member who can help us hold the utility monopolies and special interests that are blocking clean energy and lower bills for ratepayers accountable for their actions. The Data Engineer will lead EPI’s data and engineering work end-to-end — building the pipelines that ingest data from regulatory APIs and public records, and designing new tools that power our investigative research.
About EPI: EPI is a watchdog organization that exposes the harms posed by fossil-fuel and monopoly utility interests to ratepayers, democracy, and the climate. We work to shine a light on the ways that fossil-fuel companies and utilities are harming customers and slowing the transition to clean energy. Our findings inform community leaders, consumer advocates, environmentalists and others so that they have the insight they need to hold corporations and politicians accountable, and to create a cleaner and fairer energy system.
EPI is offering this position for a two-year contract. The position offers competitive benefits: health, vision, and dental insurance; life and disability insurance; a generous vacation package; and three months of paid parental leave. After two years, the position may be considered for longer-term employment.
We are a small, nimble and growing team. The position’s exact responsibilities are flexible and will be determined in part by the experience and skillset of the candidate.
Requirements
What you’ll do in this job:
- Build and maintain pipelines that pull data from regulatory agency APIs and scrape public records.
- Design and ship web-based tools — including public-facing tools that put EPI’s research in the hands of communities, advocates, and journalists.
- Apply AI and other emerging tools to help our team make sense of years of records, filings, and reports.
- Create clear and compelling data visualizations.
- Partner with teammates and teach them how to find, clean, and work with data themselves.
- Write clear how-tos and methodologies so your work is reproducible by teammates and the public.
You might be a great candidate if you have the following demonstrable knowledge, skills and/or experience:
- Software engineering experience — ideally end-to-end – including finding data, structuring it, and shipping the tools that put it to work
- Strong programming skills (Python or a comparable language) and comfort with SQL and relational databases
- Experience ingesting data from a mix of sources — APIs, web scraping, bulk downloads, document parsing
- Experience building data visualization tools or interactive dashboards
- Experience working with LLMs, including building or evaluating RAG systems
- Familiarity with regulatory data sources and campaign finance data
- Experience in nonprofit, journalism, civic tech, or research environments
- Ability to learn on the job and work independently. Our team is distributed; we collaborate and support each other, but each of us is responsible for creating and executing our own work plans without much supervision.
- Experience supporting and training colleagues in how to use data.
- A demonstrated commitment to clean energy, climate change, and economic justice
- A basic understanding of politics, including the different ways that companies and people spend money to accrue political influence
- Comfortable learning on the job — the work spans data engineering, web development, and applied AI
- A demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice
