[Hiring] Associate - Data Engineering & Insights Lead @Forest Pond Associates

Role Description

Forest Pond Associates is seeking a Senior Data Engineering and Insights Associate to support a public-sector longitudinal education and workforce data initiative. This role turns complex, confidential data into dependable data assets and decision-support products that help public agencies understand outcomes, improve operations, and make evidence-informed decisions. The associate combines hands-on cloud data engineering with analytical judgment, stakeholder partnership, and careful stewardship of sensitive information.

The work spans data pipelines, data quality, system modernization, research-ready analytics environments, dashboards, and data conversions. The associate will support several teams and products, translating policy and program questions into usable, well-governed data solutions.

Qualifications

• Advanced SQL skills, including query authoring and work with relational databases; familiarity with multiple database technologies.
• Experience building and optimizing big-data pipelines, architectures, and datasets.
• Experience designing and refining dashboards, reports, analytical models, or decision-support products for executive and non-technical audiences.
• Experience working with student-level higher-education data and linking it with other sources, such as employment or wage data, to measure outcomes or inform decisions.
• Experience analyzing internal and external data and processes to answer business questions, find root causes, and identify improvement opportunities.
• Strong analytical skills and experience working with unstructured or disconnected datasets, including extracting value from large datasets.
• Experience building and supporting data transformation processes, data structures, metadata, dependencies, and workload management.
• Working knowledge of message queuing, stream processing, and highly scalable data stores.
• Strong project-management and organizational skills, with experience supporting cross-functional teams in a changing environment.

Requirements

• Create and maintain scalable data pipeline architecture that meets functional, performance, reliability, and security needs.
• Design and implement cloud data solutions using AWS services such as S3, Glue, Redshift, EMR, Athena, Kinesis, and Lambda.
• Build and maintain orchestration workflows using Apache Airflow, AWS Step Functions, or comparable tools.
• Integrate, transform, and load data from varied sources using SQL and appropriate big-data technologies; support data conversions for modernization or system replacement.
• Assemble large, complex datasets that meet business-area requirements and support reproducible research, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, machine learning, and evidence-building.
• Build analytics tools, dashboards, reports, analytical models, and other decision-support products that make education, workforce, operational, and program outcomes easier to understand.
• Identify data-quality issues, perform root-cause analysis, and implement validation, monitoring, alerting, and logging controls across pipelines.
• Automate manual processes, improve data delivery, and redesign infrastructure when needed to increase scalability, reliability, or usability.
• Partner with data scientists, research analysts, policy analysts, executives, and technical teams to resolve data issues and improve enterprise data assets.
• Follow applicable privacy, security, data-governance, and interagency data-sharing requirements when handling confidential data.

Benefits

• Forest Pond Associates will provide applicable compensation, benefits, and employment details during the hiring process.
• Eligibility and terms depend on the final employment classification and applicable plan documents.

How to Apply

Before 09Nov2026, submit your resume and application materials through the application link for this position. Please respond to all of the application questions.