Data Engineer

University of Wisconsin Madison • Madison, WI

1d • Onsite

About The Position

The Institute on Aging (IOA) is a research unit dedicated to promoting the health and well-being of adult and aging populations through multidisciplinary research, education, and outreach. For over 25 years, the IOA has managed the MIDUS (Midlife in the US) study, a large national longitudinal study of health and well-being in over 11,000 American adults. MIDUS examines various influences on health trajectories across adult life, including emotion, personality, biology, genetics, neuroscience, work and family life, class, culture, race/ethnicity, and historical events. Data from MIDUS are publicly available and utilized by thousands of researchers globally, contributing to over 2,000 publications across diverse fields. The study also supports graduate students in completing their master's and doctoral degrees. The Data Engineer will be responsible for processing and cleaning MIDUS data, preparing data and documentation for releases, maintaining the MIDUS Colectica Portal, and responding to data requests.

Requirements

• Experience with survey data (cleaning and coding the raw data; creating documentation for dissemination)
• Detail-oriented, excellent interpersonal, problem-solving, and organizational skills
• Experience with SPSS
• Bachelor's degree required
• Continuous work eligibility in the United States

Nice To Haves

• Either two years of related experience in social science, epidemiology, or population health, OR equivalent training or experience in data management or data curation
• Experience reviewing other team members' technical work and providing constructive feedback
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to work well independently as well as on a team
• Graduate work or degree in social sciences, epidemiology, population health, or information science preferred

Responsibilities

• Organizes both data preparation and analysis steps into reproducible pipelines that can process similar data sets automatically
• Implements data analysis steps in collaboration with data scientists, statisticians, and/or other researchers and may use technologies that support data at scale
• May supervise the data-to-day activities of staff and resolves routine personnel issues
• Prepares data sets for current and future analysis including cleaning/quality assurance, transformations, restructuring, and integration of multiple data sources and may use technologies that support data at scale
• Serves as an institutional subject matter expert and liaison to key internal and external stakeholders regarding automated data management and analysis at scale for research and represents the interests of large-scale data management and analysis for research
• Develops, constructs, tests, and maintains architectures for large-scale data management and analysis
• Selects appropriate technologies and optimizes pipelines for performance
• Process and clean MIDUS data delivered to the Administrative Core by the data collection sites
• Prepare data, metadata, and documentations for new or updated MIDUS data releases
• Maintain and update the MIDUS Colectica Portal
• Respond to data or documentation requests for non-public released MIDUS data

Benefits

• Generous paid time off
• Competitively priced health/dental/vision/life insurance
• Tax-advantaged savings accounts
• Participation in the nationally recognized Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS) pension fund

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level