THE ORGANIZATION

The Charter School Growth Fund (CSGF) is a leading nonprofit venture philanthropy fund dedicated to identifying the nation’s best public charter schools, investing in their expansion, and helping to increase their impact. Our “portfolio” includes 140+ charter school networks that operate 1,100+ schools and serve more than 500,000 students. We are committed to expanding the impact of schools that are closing achievement and opportunity gaps. CSGF operates with the same strategies, discipline, and focus as a venture capital firm by awarding multi-year grants and loans to talented education entrepreneurs building networks of high-quality charter schools that enroll traditionally underserved students. Ultimately, we think the portfolio can grow to serve ~1,000,000 students within a decade.

This is an exciting time to join the Charter School Growth Fund. We are launching our next philanthropic fund in 2022, building on our 15-year track record of success. CSGF’s new five-year “Fund IV” will be larger in size and scope than previous funds, with a goal to continue to fuel charter sector growth, accelerate innovation, and strengthen long-term outcomes for students, particularly students of color and those from low-income backgrounds. Our new fund will continue to prioritize investments in leaders of color as our current portfolio is led by more than 50% leaders of color and more than 50% female leaders. We believe it is vital for the networks we support to be proximate to the lived experiences of the students and communities they serve.

THE OPPORTUNITY

About Our Team

With the launch of the next philanthropic fund, the Analytics team is expanding and evolving to meet the growing needs of an ever increasingly data driven organization. The Analytics team sits at the intersection of our investment, impact, innovation, policy, finance, and talent teams which all have data needs to drive their goals. The Analytics team also serves the need to progress monitor CSGF’s key performance indicators that measure our impact across the network. These insights are shared internally as well as with our many funders. In addition, we seek to expand the role of analytics to provide direct analysis support to our growing portfolio of charter school networks. To accomplish this, we leverage nationally collected data sets from a variety of sources and provide flexible and timely analysis to our many stakeholders and partners. 

The team is made up of three core functions: engineering, data products, and insights research. The Analytics Engineer role will bridge the gap between data engineering and data analysis. This role reports to the Director of Engineering. 

Our Analytics Stack

• Google Cloud (backbone architecture)
• Airflow (data ingestion and orchestration)
• BigQuery (data warehouse)
• dbt Cloud (data modeling/monitoring)
• Tableau (data visualization)

About This Role

As an Analytics Engineer you'll help build the analytics infrastructure that lays the foundation for effective reporting and analysis across CSGF and our portfolio of charter schools. You'll have the autonomy to create impact while tackling complex technical challenges on a full-stack data team. We are looking for an Analytics Engineer to join our team that will help build, maintain, and scale our processes to deliver well-defined, transformed, tested, documented and code-reviewed data to help drive organizational strategy where trust in data is critical. You’ll also need to demonstrate an appetite to try new approaches, staying up to date with market trends and advances in data processing and analytical modeling.

Within the first 30 days of taking on this role you will begin meeting with key stakeholders, get to know the team, and start working with all parts of our data stack and tooling. You’ll also make contributions to our codebase by extending existing transformation pipelines, testing, and analysis models. By the end of your first 60 days, you will start to influence decisions about our data warehouse architecture, coding conventions, and documentation standards as well as be able to build out a new data model from raw ingestion to analysis. At the end of your first 90 days, you’ll have begun testing the release of end-user facing self-service data models and interactive data dictionary and catalogue. We’ll also ask you to provide feedback on the team’s onboarding processes based on your experience. 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Below is a general outline of responsibilities. CSGF is a fast-moving organization, roles and responsibilities may change to meet the needs of the organization and the charter networks we support.

Data Transformation and Modeling

• Provide clean, transformed analysis-ready data sets to analysts and stakeholders, modeling data in a way that empowers end users to answer their own questions
• Help guide the redesign of our data warehouse architecture from the ground up with a focus on efficiency, flexibility, reproducibility, performance, and quality

Data Quality, Testing, and Documentation

• Develop and maintain data workflows to ingest, validate, test and model data to support analytics needs
• Create documentation and testing to ensure that our data sources are accurate and easily understandable
• Curate the catalog of model definitions so that the analysts and researchers can do their work more effectively
• Enforce code quality by identifying and reducing tech debt, standardizing styles, and removing deprecated objects from code and downstream reports
• Perform in-depth QA by diving in to various data sources to identify and resolve issues 

Best Practices and Capacity Building

• Discover and institute best practices for analytics engineering across all members of the data team (ex: version control, testing, continuous integration)
• Share methodologies and instruct other data team members on how to best write data transformations

You’re a good fit if you are:

• A data-savvy engineer or a software-savvy analyst, with experience designing, implementing and maintaining reliable data models using the modern data stack
• Excited about enabling data analysts, insights researchers, and other stakeholders to leverage the wealth of data we currently collect to increase our impact
• Always looking for the right solution for the problem at hand, irrespective of how fancy it looks

You care about problems like:

• Is it possible to build a single data source that allows us to answer this entire set of analysis questions?
• What is the clearest possible naming convention for tables in our warehouse?
• What if I could be notified of a problem in the data before a stakeholder finds a broken chart in Tableau?
• What do analysts or other stakeholders need to understand about this data to be able to quickly use it?

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

Expected Skills and Characteristics

• Proven track record of using SQL to transform raw data into actionable insights
• A strong understanding of data quality testing (preferably in an automated fashion)
• Solid foundation in data warehouse architecture and modern data modeling standards
• Familiarity with software development best practices and their applications to analytics (version control, testing, CI/CD, automation).
• Skilled at synthesizing non-technical requests into technical output
• Ability to identify roadblocks, communicate trade-offs, raise risks early, and take a systematic approach to problem solving
• Strong attention to detail and focus on accuracy over urgency
• Capacity to quickly learn new skills, seek honest feedback from peers and mentors, and know when to ask for help

Nice to Haves

• Experience with BigQuery Standard SQL syntax
• Experience with dbt in a production environment
• Experience in at least one programming language for data analysis and/or scripting (Python preferred)
• Familiarity with cloud data warehouse solutions (ex: Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake)
• Familiarity with data visualization tools (ex: Tableau, PowerBI, Looker, etc)

Educational Background and Work Experience

• 1+ years of full-time work experience as an analytics engineer, data analyst, BI analyst, data engineer or similar
• Experience in education/non-profit field is a plus

WORKING AT CSGF

We are focused on hiring and developing great people and believe that building diverse perspectives across our team makes us more effective in expanding our impact. (This is reflected in Our Commitment to Diversity Statement.) Our core values are:

• We work relentlessly to create efficient, measurable, and sustainable results. We strive for excellence and pursue our mission tenaciously. Ideally, you thrive working in a self-directed manner in a fluid environment where flexibility and tenacity are required.
• We embrace calculated risks and new approaches. We have an entrepreneurial spirit that welcomes innovation, diversity of ideas, and risk. We rely on you to question conventional wisdom and think independently.
• We are truthful, fair, and trustworthy in all aspects of our work. We hold ourselves and our partners to the highest ethical standards. We trust you will too.
• We appreciate the challenges faced by education entrepreneurs and recognize the limits of our own knowledge. We understand that our ultimate success depends on that of our partners. Your humility will be key to building trusted and authentic relationships.
• We value each of our team members as individuals but believe that we achieve the best results by working together. We willingly sacrifice individual interests and recognition for greater collective impact. We hope having fun at work is important to you and that you are a team player.

COMPENSATION

Compensation is commensurate with experience and education. The target salary range for this role is $80,000 - $100,000 annually. CSGF offers a very competitive compensation package.

START DATE

CSGF is seeking candidates who can start as soon as possible.

Charter School Growth Fund provides equal employment opportunity for all applicants and employees.