Data Acquisition Engineer

Parcell is a modern site-selection and scoring platform focused on affordable housing developers. The Data Acquisition Engineer will be responsible for sourcing, validating, and integrating complex data from various external sources to support the company's scoring needs.

Responsibilities:

• Track down the external data our scoring needs—including poorly documented, inconsistent, or hard-to-access sources—and confirm you can reliably get usable data out of them
• Reverse-engineer undocumented portals, APIs, and feeds to extract meaningful data
• Evaluate new and existing sources for coverage, quality, and fit against each state's requirements and scoring criteria
• Figure out how messy, real-world data has to be reshaped to be useful, and get it into our platform in a form scoring can trust
• Work with varied formats (shapefiles, GeoJSON, CSVs, county/state feeds) and reproject spatial data correctly across coordinate systems
• Load, structure, and index geospatial and tabular data in PostgreSQL/PostGIS using our internal tooling and scripts (Node.js, Bash, SQL)
• Make every data pull repeatable—a re-runnable path to refresh each source on its cadence, not a one-time extraction only you know how to repeat
• Monitor upstream sources for format or schema changes and update pulls before they break a launch
• Validate spatial and tabular data beyond row counts—geometry validity, topology, and coverage gaps—to ensure accuracy before it reaches scoring
• Document where each dataset lives, how it was sourced, and how to refresh it

Requirements:

• A track record of getting data out of difficult, poorly documented sources—you've reverse-engineered an undocumented endpoint, scraped a stubborn portal, or wrangled a malformed feed into something clean, and you find that kind of puzzle satisfying rather than frustrating
• Solid working proficiency with PostGIS—reprojecting between coordinate systems, validating and repairing geometry, spatial indexing, and spatial joins. You don't need to be a GIS specialist, but you're well past 'I've used ST_Intersects.'
• Strong SQL skills (PostgreSQL) with the ability to write queries for analysis, validation, and troubleshooting
• Hands-on experience shipping and maintaining production code in a typed language (we use Node.js/TypeScript; strong experience in Go, Java, or Python transfers well)
• A reproducibility instinct—you treat 'I can re-run this cleanly next quarter' as part of the job, not an afterthought
• Excellent attention to detail and comfort working with messy data and edge cases
• Strong communicator able to collaborate with our implementation team, software engineers, and external data providers
• Passionate about affordable housing and real estate development is a plus