Implementation Engineer

About the role

We're a small, fast-moving group that partners with state governments to identify opportunities for impact in the criminal justice space. That's where you come in. We're looking for an empathetic, fast learner who is excited to own relationships with our state partners' data teams and prepare raw data for analytics and product development.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain state data ingest pipelines: write Python and SQL to ingest, normalize, and validate raw criminal justice data from state partners into Recidiviz's platform, handling messy schemas, legacy formats, and evolving data feeds.
• Own your state portfolio end-to-end: serve as the primary technical owner for 1–2 state partners, managing ingest quality, resolving data issues, and prioritizing technical work in collaboration with your State Engagement Managers, Product Managers, Data Analysts, and Software Engineers.
• Scope and deploy solutions in partnership with states: collaborate with state IT staff and agency leadership to understand data systems and constraints, define integration approaches, and translate partner needs into clear technical plans.
• Drive initiatives from backlog to production: independently pick up and complete scoped tickets - from code remappings and raw data documentation to net-new ingest for newly signed states - with appropriate guidance from your technical lead.
• Act as a feedback loop to product and engineering: bring on-the-ground context from partner deployments back to our core teams, helping to make the platform more robust, configurable, and scalable.
• Support onboarding of new states: as new partners sign, contribute to ingest scoping and early pipeline work, helping Recidiviz move quickly from signed contract to live data.

Requirements

High empathy and kindness - genuine care for the mission and the people we serve
2+ years of experience building, maintaining, or debugging data pipelines in a production environment
Strong proficiency in SQL and relational databases, with an appetite for wrangling large-scale, messy data
Solid Python skills - comfortable writing clean, testable scripts and pipeline code
Experience working cross-functionally or in a customer-facing capacity, with the ability to communicate technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
Comfort with ambiguity: you can explore an undocumented legacy system, form a hypothesis, and write code to test it
Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience

Qualifications

• Experience working with government data systems, legacy enterprise data, or regulated data environments (e.g., CJIS, HIPAA)
• Familiarity with ETL frameworks, data validation patterns, or cloud data infrastructure (GCP preferred)
• Experience scoping technical projects or translating business/policy requirements into engineering work
• Experience with technical integrations: building or consuming REST APIs (OAuth, API keys, pagination, error handling), as well as product integration techniques such as deep linking, and iframe embedding - experience deploying web-based tools into state or government environments is a plus
• Comfort with light full-stack work (React/TypeScript) for configuration or tooling tasks
• Familiarity with AI coding tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot) - we use these extensively
• Proximity to one of our state partner capitals is a meaningful plus

Skills

• SQL
• Google Cloud Platform
• Python
• Relationship Building

Benefits

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 compensation for this role is: $97,000

Pay

Commensurate with experience

Schedule

Full-time