Data Engineer

Why NAMI?

At NAMI, your work will directly support programs and services that improve the lives of individuals and families affected by mental illness. You'll join a collaborative team, enjoy a flexible remote environment, and have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact every day.

Join NAMI's Software Engineering team and help build the data platform that supports programs reaching millions of Americans affected by mental illness. You'll work with modern cloud technologies, partner across the organization, and help shape the future of data at NAMI.

You will join a collaborative Information Systems Engineering team that values knowledge sharing, professional development, and continuous improvement. Working closely with Engineering, Salesforce, Programs & Services, the Success Team, and the Data Team, this role will help strengthen data quality, streamline reporting processes, and develop reliable data solutions for NAMI staff and affiliates. The position will also support the responsible evaluation and use of emerging technologies, including AI.

What You'll Do

NAMI’s Data Engineer will build and operate the data platform that helps our national office, state organizations, and hundreds of local affiliates measure program impact, reach underserved communities, and make data-informed decisions.

Working on the Software Engineering team, you will work across the full data platform — ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and reporting. This role builds and operates ELT pipelines, develops well-modeled transformations using analytics engineering best practices, and delivers trusted, well-documented data products — executing within established architectural patterns and contributing to their continuous improvement.

In This Role, You Will

1. Help leadership measure program impact and make well-informed strategy decisions by building NAMI’s central data warehouse and ELT pipeline from sources across the organization (e.g., micro-services, Salesforce, and the LMS).
2. Reduce manual reporting by giving state organizations, local affiliates, and colleagues richer, on-demand access to their data — partnering directly with stakeholders to stand up curated datasets and self-service reporting that replace today's hand-built affiliate reports.
3. Ensure every team can trust the data behind its decisions by expanding automated quality testing, monitoring, and CI/CD as the platform grows — and owning incidents end-to-end, source to dashboard, when something slips through.
4. Set the foundation every future data hire builds on — as the team's first dedicated data engineer, establish the standards, patterns, and review practices that define how NAMI does data.

What Qualifications You'll Bring

• 3–5 years in data, analytics, or backend engineering
• Proficiency in SQL and Python
• Experience with version-controlled production ELT/ETL pipelines, including testing and monitoring
• Solid grasp of data modeling (e.g., dimensional modeling, layered architecture)
• Experience with a modern cloud data warehouse
• Communicates technical concepts clearly to non-technical colleagues

Preferred Skills & Experiences

NAMI's data platform is early in its build, and our tooling choices are still taking shape. No specific tool below is required - but exposure to the modern data ecosystem will help you ramp quickly and contribute to how our stack evolves.

• Hands-on experience with a SQL transformation framework such as dbt
• Exposure to managed ingestion or orchestration tooling (e.g., Fivetran, Airbyte, Dagster, Airflow)
• Experience with a BI tool such as Power BI, Tableau, or Metabase
• Experience helping evaluate, adopt, or migrate to new data tooling

Work environment:

• Remote or optionally hybrid (if preferred) at our Arlington, VA headquarters
• Employees must be available during standard business hours, with core hours between 10:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. ET
• 10 – 20% travel, including overnight.

Physical requirements:

Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.

NAMI is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workforce. NAMI prohibits discrimination and harassment against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, marital status, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, genetic information or any other legally protected group status. We also provide reasonable accommodation for candidates with disability.