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 and integrating complex data from various difficult-to-access sources to support the scoring needs of the platform.

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