Data Engineering Director

DATA ENGINEERING DIRECTOR

Remote (U.S.-based) | Full-Time | $130K-$140K

Join Courier Newsroom - an organization that drives journalism and empowers communities.

At Courier Newsroom, we're reinventing local media to inform and empower communities through impactful reporting. Our mission is rooted in civic engagement and equity-and we're growing fast.

We are presently looking for a DATA ENGINEERING DIRECTOR to build and manage our newsroom's data engineering function.

COURIER Newsroom is committed to building an inclusive workplace that values diverse perspectives and lived experiences. We strongly encourage women, people of color, individuals with disabilities, LGBTQ+ candidates, and those from all backgrounds to apply. As an equal opportunity employer, we strive to break down barriers and ensure every team member feels seen, heard, and supported.

Description

You'll lead a small team of data engineers supporting fast-moving newsrooms and different functions across the organization. This is equal parts technical leadership and individual contribution: architect solutions that drive business impact, work with the larger organization to define team goals, participate in and oversee development of data pipelines, and scale Courier's data infrastructure building for its future. Your team's output feeds our data analysts, who in turn support reporters, editors, and newsroom leadership.


Who you are

You've done this before. You communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders without condescension. You'll need to balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery, making architectural decisions that serve both immediate deadlines and long-term maintainability. You build systems that your team can maintain without you. Most importantly, you can manage both up and down: setting realistic expectations with leadership while creating space for your engineers to do their best work.

Responsibilities

• Team leadership: Establish and manage team goals, set technical direction, and remove blockers
• Mentor data engineers: Provide guidance on project architectural decisions, give feedback on code, and be a partner in guiding professional development
• Architecture decisions: Oversee data infrastructure design that scales with newsroom needs while remaining flexible enough to pivot when priorities shift
• Stakeholder partnership: Understand business needs and translate them into delivering value to Courier's stakeholders, readers, and followers
• Hands-on engineering: Contribute to pipeline codebases when necessary, peer review and give guidance on code development.
• Technical strategy: Balance speed and sustainability in a deadline-driven environment

Technical Requirements

• Experience in the following areas:
• Python development and debugging: Strong command of the language for data ingestion, transformation, and pipeline development
• Data Pipeline management: Data modeling, orchestration, transformation, and query optimization at scale. Google BigQuery, Dagster+, dbt preferred
• Data extraction: Proven experience with REST APIs, web scraping, and creative data acquisition
• Public Cloud management: Understanding of billing and monitoring, GCP preferred
• Application architecture:
  fundamental knowledge of app development and scaling for delivering data in unique ways
• JIRA: Training in Agile methodology is preferred

Courier Newsroom offers the following benefits:

• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO), 11 paid holidays a year
• An Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Full suite of health benefits
• $500 home office reimbursement
• 401k
• Flexible working arrangements

Courier Newsroom is an equal opportunity employer. Women, people of color, those with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community are strongly urged to apply. Applicants shall not be discriminated against because of race, religion, sex, national origin, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, color, marital status, or medical conditions.

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