Data Warehouse Engineer

About UMass Amherst

UMass Amherst, the Commonwealth's flagship campus, is a nationally ranked public research university offering a full range of undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees. The University sits on nearly 1,450-acres in the scenic Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and offers a rich cultural environment in a bucolic setting close to major urban centers. In addition, the University is part of the Five Colleges (including Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, and Smith College), which adds to the intellectual energy of the region.

 

Job Summary

The Data Engineer plays a critical role in developing, managing and optimizing the University’s centralized data warehouse, which aggregates data from diverse systems and sources across the entire campus ecosystem. As part of a collaborative team, this individual will be responsible for ensuring the smooth operation and continual enhancement of the data warehouse infrastructure. This position ensures integration with the University’s central analytics platform so that data can be used in real time for interactive dashboards that drive key initiatives for the university.  This position requires a blend of technical expertise, problem-solving abilities, and a deep understanding of data systems to ensure seamless data availability for reporting, analysis, and live dashboards that support the university's strategic initiatives.

 

Essential Functions

• Work with key stakeholders to define the data warehouse's core technical requirements, ensuring that it supports the long-term needs of the university while being flexible for future growth and additional data sources.
• Ensure that the warehouse is scalable, capable of handling future data growth and the integration of new data sources.
• Collaborate with senior engineers to design, build, and maintain data pipelines across a wide variety of programs and current and historical sources. Develop ETL processes. Develop data modeling and database design activities concurrent with the specific needs for stakeholders and projects Collaborate with business analysts, data scientists, and other teams across the university to understand their data needs and translate these into data models, ETL workflows, and reports.
• Support day to day operations for the data warehouse. Monitor and optimize integration performance for data. Perform data quality checks and troubleshooting to ensure data accuracy.
• Create comprehensive documentation detailing the data warehouse architecture, ETL processes, data flows, and technical decisions.
• Stay current with emerging technologies and best practices in data engineering.
• Follow best practices for data governance, ensuring compliance with university policies and data security standards.
• Participate in data warehouse projects, work with the senior developers and business analyst(s) to develop project roadmaps.
• Optimize warehouse performance and provide ongoing troubleshooting and support.

 

Other Functions

Performs other duties as assigned.

 

Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience, Certifications, Licensure)

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field with 5 years work experience  supporting technical infrastructure, cloud orchestration or coding in a data driven business environment; a Master’s degree may substitute for 2 year of required experience.
• Strong working knowledge to utilize programming languages and relational databases.
• Strong working knowledge of data warehousing concepts and tools, ETL tools, and documentation for large data sets.
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment and communicate effectively.
• Excellent analytical and organizational skills for discovery, consultation, and implementation of processes and projects.

 

Preferred Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience, Certifications, Licensure)

• Experience working in a large and/or complex educational environment. 
• Experience with SQL and my SQL programming. Solid knowledge of programming languages such as Python, Java, or Scala.
• Experience with cloud data warehouse solutions (e.g. Snowflake and Redshift)
• Experience with data processing frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Hadoop).
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure).
• Knowledge of data visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI).
• Familiarity with version control systems (e.g., Git).