Senior Data Analyst (Technical Lead)

Recidiviz is thrilled to be hiring a Senior Data Analyst to join our team! We’re a small, fast-moving group that works with complex criminal justice data from our state partners and develops analyses that target the drivers of incarceration in specific systems. That’s where you come in. We’re looking for people who have an attention to detail to provide rigor to our analysis, creativity and inquisitiveness to identify and solve open-ended problems, clarity to think through complex and variable data, flexibility to adjust in a rapidly evolving environment, and above all else, a collaborative, kind nature to add to our culture.

About us

Recidiviz is creating safer, healthier communities by improving outcomes for people in the criminal justice system. We build technology to reduce the number of people in prison and to help criminal justice leaders embrace data-driven decision-making. 

Using software tools and thoughtful product design, we’ve been able to safely and permanently reduce incarceration and improve outcomes. We work side-by-side with leaders of the criminal justice system, people in prison and on supervision, and ecosystem partners to build a better path forward. In addition to the revenue we earn from state partners, some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations support our work.

People who succeed at Recidiviz lead with kindness and humility, assume good intent, learn from failure, and fix problems when they see them. They are excited to work arm in arm with government leadership and staff to improve outcomes. They are great listeners. They build deep relationships with and empathy for the people we work with and the people who our mission serves, even when those two groups feel at odds. 

About the role

This role collaborates across several teams to guide work that targets the drivers of incarceration. Our Data Analysts work with criminal justice data from across the country to develop our understanding of the system and motivate change. They perform analyses, contribute to data tooling, and ensure each product in each state has the analytical foundation required to drive impact.

In this role, roughly half of your time will be spent as a technical lead, coordinating cross-functional teams to deliver products for specific state partners. You'll work closely with State Engagement and Product Management to assess feasibility, manage delivery, and keep technical teams unblocked and aligned. The other half of your time is dedicated to hands-on data analysis and individual contributor work.

Travel is encouraged approximately once every 6 months to state partners within the continental USA, and occasionally required. We expect these trips to include visits to prisons and parole offices.

Core responsibilities

• Leading technical delivery for a set of state partners: breaking down roadmaps into well-scoped tickets with owners and deadlines, coordinating handoffs across data, engineering, and product teams, and keeping the team unblocked and on track
• Assessing technical feasibility of state initiatives early and often, and partnering with State Engagement and Product Management to determine technical timelines and inform the product roadmap
• Monitoring team capacity and triaging incoming work, flagging resource gaps or at-risk timelines to functional leads before they become blockers
• Analyzing criminal justice datasets to surface insights, and presenting findings to internal and external stakeholders to drive impact
• Partnering with State Engagement, Product Management, and Software Engineering to bring data models and analyses into production software

Wild success

A year from now:

• You've driven technical delivery. Your project management has led to several successful product launches across the country, directly contributing to measurable outcomes in the justice systems where we work.
• You've made the team more effective. The people around you have less scramble, clearer ownership, and smoother handoffs, making it easier for teammates to focus on high-quality work.
• You've leveled up our analytical team. Your contributions to tooling, processes, and support for your teammates have helped set the team up to achieve more impact sooner.

Minimum qualifications

• Experience with technical project management or technical team leadership. You've kept complex, cross-functional technical work organized, tracked, and moving
• Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication skills. You're comfortable working across engineering, product, and data teams, and can translate technical considerations for non-technical partners
• Enthusiasm for working with internal and external partners from diverse backgrounds and worldviews, such as government staff, researchers, journalists, technical staff, and practitioners in criminal justice reform
• Ability to inspect source data, reason about data models, examine results closely, and prepare data and analyses that are usable for various applications
• 5 or more years of practical experience exploring, analyzing, and processing complex datasets
• Professional work experience using SQL to work with large datasets, including high proficiency writing efficient queries for more complex data extraction and transformation tasks
• Professional work experience and high proficiency using Python, specifically the Pandas library, for tasks such as statistical analysis and data visualization

Preferred qualifications

• Experience working in a cross-functional organization that designs, builds, and launches products for users
• Experience working with large datasets from the public sector, especially related to criminal justice
• Familiarity with our data stack, which includes Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, Looker, Jupyter notebooks, and Python/Pandas
• Experience using project tracking tools such as GitHub Projects

Compensation

Compensation is standardized based on roles and responsibilities. This ensures equitable compensation and responsible stewardship of our resources. As such, we do not negotiate compensation offers. 

The annual compensation for this role is: $120,000.

What we offer

• Effective, extremely thoughtful colleagues, working together on a mission that matters
• 90% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible time off, including 20 days of PTO, 3 days of paid volunteering time, and 13 paid holidays
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
• Complimentary One Medical membership (depending on location)
• Partnership with Carrot to provide employees with inclusive fertility and family-forming benefits, as well as a small but growing number of hormonal health and gender-affirming care benefits
• Monthly ClassPass credit for personal wellness
• Free mental health support via Talkspace
• Well-located offices in Oakland and Manhattan, with the flexibility to work remotely or go into either office as you choose
• An annual company offsite each spring and other ad-hoc gatherings
• All the exhilarating challenges and stretch opportunities of a tech startup, combined with the mission-driven heart of a nonprofit

More about Recidiviz

Recidiviz was an all-volunteer effort until early 2019, when Clementine, Andrew, and Joshua founded the organization. Since then, we’ve built an A-team of software engineers, designers, product managers and domain experts, from companies like Google, Apple, Dropbox, Opower, and Sidewalk Labs. Recidiviz was part of Y-Combinator’s 2019 class and has received support from some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations, including Ford Foundation, Mackenzie Scott, Schmidt Futures, Arnold Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Mozilla Foundation.

Today, Recidiviz works with (and earns revenue from) over 19 state partners – big and small, red and blue – and covers more than 45% of the US incarcerated population. We have helped to get tens of thousands of people out of the criminal justice system, safely and equitably, and saved states nearly $1 billion. In the next five years, Recidiviz plans to partner with 40 states and help 250,000 people who are stuck in the system to get out and stay out. In addition to partnering with state Departments of Corrections, Recidiviz collaborates with and learns from partners – from organizations like the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) to community based organizations and justice-impacted individuals, whose perspectives guide our work.

To learn more about how we do what we do, check out our 2024 Year in Review, read some press coverage, or watch our TED Talk. And if you’re really keen to see our work, you can dive into our Github :).

An important note

Lasting change is always built on diversity. Recidiviz recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, gender identity and all protected status as required by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a special need that requires accommodation, please let us know in your application. Even if you don't think you meet all the criteria above, drop your resume, and we'll take a look – you might be great for another role or another time!