Contractor: Lead Analytics Engineer

About the role

Why You'll Love This Role:

In this role, you will have the opportunity to directly shape our data ecosystem by building robust pipelines and applying modern software engineering principles like version control and automated testing. You’ll work closely with key stakeholders to drive data-driven decision-making, lead high-impact initiatives, and manage large-scale infrastructure and automation. If you thrive on transforming complex data into reliable, actionable insights while building scalable analytics systems, this position offers the ideal platform to showcase and expand your expertise.

What You'll Be Doing:

Data Modeling and Transformation


Build new analyses and support existing ones using SQL and Python.

Apply software engineering principles like version control and continuous integration to the analytics codebase.

Expand our data warehouse with clean data ready for analysis.

Data Quality and Testing


Apply advanced data testing strategies to ensure resulting datastores are aligned with expected business logic.

Implement validation checks and automated testing procedures to manage data quality in your ETL/ELT pipelines.

Collaboration and Communication


Work with stakeholders to define business logic and data expectations.

Help drive a change in the usage of data by actively surfacing insights to stakeholders.

Lead initiatives and problem definition, scoping, design, and planning.

Infrastructure and Automation



Build tools and automation to run data infrastructure.

Manage large-scale data migrations in relational datastores.

About You:

8+ Years experience working with data in a software environment.

Required Skills: Mastered proficiency in SQL and Python; advanced experience managing business semantic layer tooling, data catalog tooling and data integrity testing frameworks. Experience with dbt orchestration and best practices.

You have a track record of working autonomously and proactively, with deep domain knowledge of data systems.

Required Tech Stack: SQL, Python, relational datastores, DAG tooling (like Dagster or Airflow), dbt and Tableau.

Experience with cloud-based infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Terraform) and document, graph, or schema-less datastores.

Why you’ll love working at Newsela:

Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

About Newsela:

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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