Spring 2026 - Data Engineering Intern, Research Central

Vera Institute of Justice • Los Angeles, WA

11d • $16 - $25 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Data Engineering Intern for the Research Department’s Central Data Science team at Vera is an opportunity for a college student or recent grad to immerse themselves into working in a data role at a non-profit organization. Their work will support the construction and maintenance of a centralized data ingestion/processing framework and data warehouse to support researchers who work with public and/or large-scale data in national and place-based initiatives. The data engineering intern will participate in all day-to-day team activities, ranging from project planning and execution, code review sessions, pair programming, social activities, and more. They will work directly with a senior data engineer on the team on a range of responsibilities, including data collection, data modelling, automation, building data infrastructure, and ensuring data quality. In addition to day-to-day data tasks, the intern will focus on a project that they will work on over the course of their internship that is relevant to their interests and experience. This might involve helping to design and manage large-scale data infrastructure systems, creating computational frameworks, designing data models, or building new tools to empower our organization’s researchers or community partners to leverage and improve Vera’s existing repository of data. Depending on their interest, other day-to-day tasks could include exploratory analyses, analytical software development, web scraping, or other related areas of interest. This is a commitment over the Fall 2025 semester with some flexibility as to start and end date.

Requirements

• Demonstrated proficiency working with data collection and processing in Python, with preference for experience using SQL and Python Pandas library
• Proficiency developing code collaboratively using GitHub
• Commitment to advancing racial and gender equity
• Curiosity about emerging research and advocacy in the criminal justice space and/or immigration spaces
• Wrestles with creative and concrete ways to use data to shift power and advance equity and inclusion

Nice To Haves

• Professional, personal or academic engagement with issues of mass incarceration and mass criminalization
• Experience working with Google Cloud Platform and its tools, including Airflow
• The current tech stack uses the following technologies and working familiarity in the following is preferred: Python GitHub Google Cloud Platform and/or AWS BigQuery and/or PostgreSQL (or similar relational database technology) Airflow Docker

Responsibilities

• Data ingestion Integrate new sources of criminal justice, immigration, and economics data into our internally collected data; clean, transform, organize, ensure quality of production data
• Refactor existing web scrapers and data processes to new centralized infrastructure and frameworks
• Central data model construction Contribute code to building a central data model for unrestricted datasets
• Code review and codebase maintenance Help maintain existing codebase through reviewing requests
• Coordinate with data science staff to ensure consistency of datasets, naming conventions, code repository structure, etc.
• Other support tasks, as needed

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Part-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees