About TalkingPoints
TalkingPoints is an award-winning education technology non-profit organization with the mission to unlock the potential of low-income, underserved families to support their children’s learning by partnering with their children’s schools. We are building a one-of-a-kind product in the market, a multilingual family engagement platform that connects families and teachers using human and artificial intelligence powered, two-way translated messages and personalized supports — eliminating language, time limitations, and know-how as barriers to school/family connection.
Millions of teachers and families are using TalkingPoints in their classrooms, schools and districts across the United States. TalkingPoints works with key school district partners such as Oakland Unified, Seattle Public Schools, Boston Public Schools, Buffalo Public School, Wake County and NYC DOE. We have won awards from NYU, MIT, Google, Forbes and are backed by Google, Eric Schmidt, AT&T, Cisco, and Stanford University to name a few.
TalkingPoints is at a critical inflection point in the organization's growth. We continue to see exponential growth in both our user base and our own internal structure. It's an important time to join our team and build on our momentum and ability to support students and families during this critical time in which education equity gaps are more concerning than ever.
Diversity: we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it!
The opportunity
As our Data Architect, you will be responsible for the strategic design of internal data infrastructure and system integrations for enabling self-service consumption patterns for stakeholders in philanthropy, marketing, sales, product, research, and operations. The Data Architect will design event-driven data solutions and establish strategies for improving the speed, security, scalability, and reliability of data migrations.
The ideal candidate is passionate about improving equity in education for under-resourced students through AI-based, data-informed solutions. The Data Architect will report to the Head of Data and provide technical coaching to Data Team members in data engineering and machine learning.
Responsibilities:
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Data Governance and Security
- Ensure data quality, security and privacy by establishing and maintaining data governance processes
- Develop data architecture solutions to support the company’s Data Strategy and OKRs
- Develop event-driven architecture to support real-time data processing using flexible data warehousing principles such as lakehouse architecture
- Develop data policies for access, retention, and use for compliance standards such as SOC2
- Set up and maintain role-based access control for internal data platforms
- Stay up-to-date with emerging technologies and best practices in data architecture and make recommendations for improvements
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Data Modeling
- Develop data mapping artifacts describing table transformations that are interpretable by technical team members and meet stakeholder requirements
- Develop processes for automatically updating data documentation such as ERDs as tables are created and updated
- Define stakeholder data access patterns for self-service of business critical data assets
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Requirements Gathering and Technical Mentoring
- Communicate with stakeholders in philanthropy, marketing, sales, product, research, and operations to understand data needs, document use cases, and write technical specifications for implementation
- Provide technical coaching for Data Team members in data engineering and machine learning in areas such as unit testing, CI/CD, optimization, and troubleshooting
Who you are
- 5+ years experience in data engineering with at least 3 years in a data architect role
- 5+ years experience designing cloud-based data solutions using AWS and/or GCP services
- 3+ years experience managing cloud-based data services such as Snowflake or Databricks
- Exceptional ability to communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Knowledge of best practices in master data management, data modeling, and lakehouse architecture
- Experience designing event-driven architecture solutions using streaming technologies such as Kinesis or Kafka
- Experience designing and managing a data catalog shared across functional groups
- Experience designing CI/CD processes for improving the reliability and speed of ETL/ELT pipeline development
- Experience gathering requirements from data stakeholders and creating acceptance criteria and designing test cases
- Advanced SQL knowledge and expertise in query optimization
Nice to haves:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field
- Domain knowledge in education and current educational technology trends
- Experience with SIS integrations using tools such as Clever, Classlink, and/or PowerSchool
- Experience designing REST API methods
- Experience working with non-relational databases such as MongoDB
- Experience supporting machine learning and/or research applications
Overall fit with our org culture - we look for team members who are
- User and mission-oriented: we are devoted to our mission with empathy towards the communities we serve.
- All-in together: we go above and beyond the job description, working together as a team.
- Agile & action-oriented: we get things done, knowing that our progress is urgent to our communities.
- Always Learning: we are always learning, with a growth mindset, to reach our full potential.
- Boldly Courageous: we take risks in order to achieve big things.
- Resourceful: We are creative, solution-oriented, and scrappy.
What we offer
- An incredible opportunity to build a mission-driven, rapidly growing startup tech nonprofit
- Competitive salary, full coverage health insurance, benefits, and unlimited time off
- 401K match
- Annual professional development benefit
- Flexibility to work remotely
- Fun, smart, dynamic, and motivated team
How to apply
Please submit your resume, a brief paragraph describing your interest, and a link to your LinkedIn profile
