SPEND - Senior Data & Systems Analyst

The Strategic Public Education National Data (SPEND) Initiative is seeking a Senior Data & Systems Analyst to develop, validate, and analyze education finance data. The role supports data continuity and enrichment, machine learning model development, data quality, and the release of public data products.

Responsibilities:

• In collaboration with senior technical staff, support internal data systems and ingestion processes through data pipelines
• Support the Senior Associate Data Scientist to create and implement processes to enhance current federal school finance data collections through data product development
• Build and maintain quality assurance processes that identify anomalies and outliers in district- and state-level financial data
• Deepen current data by accurately and completely incorporating long-term obligations such as pension and facilities expenditures
• Implement processes to correctly incorporate contributions from sub-contractor subject matter experts
• Support development and release of data products (datasets, interactive web tools) to share SPEND and public education finance data
• Support creation and maintenance of training data for machine learning models that map local accounting codes to standardized national categories
• Manage the manual validation of the ML outputs, checking automated results against real-world district spending data
• Evaluate model outputs and conduct error analysis in collaboration with the technical team
• Performs deep-dive analysis on finalized datasets to identify and resolve anomalies before public release
• Document analytical methods, assumptions, and validation results clearly and reproducibly
• Contribute to development, maintenance, and improvement of cloud infrastructure to support short-term and long-term objectives
• Develop internal and public-facing methodological documentation to build trust in, and encourage use of SPEND data products across audience groups
• Regularly collaborate with team members (scientists, engineers, etc.) and external stakeholders (policy experts, state and district leaders, etc.) to advance the organizational mission

Requirements:

• Bachelor's in Data Science, Computer Science, Public Policy, or a related field
• Working knowledge of Python, SQL, and familiarity with modern cloud data infrastructure such as Google Cloud Platform
• Experience with version control through git in a professional setting
• Demonstrated experience working as part of a high-performing technical team
• Experience translating analytical models and findings into clear policy insights
• Experience working with messy and inconsistently structured datasets
• Must be authorized to work for an employer in the United States. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time
• Advanced degree (Master's or PhD)
• Experience with public sector data systems or education finance reporting structures