Senior Strategy Analyst

About the role

CPAL, the Child Poverty Action Lab, operates as an unofficial research and development lab for Dallas, using data to rethink public systems, in service of cutting childhood poverty in Dallas by 50 percent within a single generation. This role sits on CPAL's Strategic Analytics team, reporting to the Head of Strategic Analytics, on a small, senior team of analytical generalists working across housing, economic mobility, maternal health, education, and public safety. You'll take an ambiguous ask and turn it into an answerable question, interrogate unreviewed data before building on it, and turn analysis into a decision-ready brief a program lead can use in front of a reporter, a funder, or a city partner, today.

Responsibilities

• Take an ambiguous request and turn it into an answerable analytical question
• Interrogate unreviewed data before building on it
• Turn analysis into a decision-ready brief a program lead can use in front of a reporter, a funder, or a city partner
• Be the person a program lead calls when they need to know what the data actually says, by end of day

Qualifications

• 3 to 5 years of applied analytical work, typically at a strategy, boutique data science, or analytical consulting firm, or an equivalent unusual-early-responsibility trajectory running analytics for a high-growth startup, agency, or civic organization
• Can point to work that reads like "determined whether X predicted Y," not just "built the dashboard that shows Y"
• Professionally fluent in Python with working SQL
• Can read and adapt existing R
• Habit of communicating to a named non-technical audience—a program lead, a school administrator, a county department—not just other analysts
• Daily working fluency with AI-assisted analytical tools, with concrete examples of when you overrode or corrected what the AI gave you

Hiring process

• Create an account on provn.co and submit all required application artifacts
• Candidates who complete a full application are reviewed with priority over resume-only applications
• Complete a challenge built by CPAL and submit a short video walking through your approach (no time limit, no timers, no restrictions on AI usage)
• The hiring manager reviews every completed submission; strongest candidates go straight to an interview round
• No referral needed—performance over pedigree, proof over polish

Pay & benefits

• Compensation is competitive and dependent on experience
• This is a seat with real reach: direct access to program leaders and public-agency partners, work that can move a resource-allocation decision, a program design choice, or an external message across more than one issue area
• AI-native ways of working actively supported and expected

Schedule & location

• This role is based in Dallas, with a Dallas-preferred, flexible-for-the-right-candidate posture
• Remote-first candidates are considered, with occasional on-site time in Dallas
• CPAL is open to sponsoring candidates for this role

Applications close September 14, 2026.