Senior Data Engineer

ACLU - National Office • New York, NY

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

The ACLU seeks applicants for the full-time position of Senior Data Engineer in the Technology Department of the ACLU’s National office in New York, NY. This is a hybrid role that has in-office requirements of two (2) days per week or eight (8) days per month.
The ACLU Technology Department is a broad umbrella covering both the ACLU’s Analytics and its Product & Engineering teams, two robust and innovative divisions that power the work of the ACLU. The department provides trusted, dependable, and impactful analytics, engineering, as well as product management and product design expertise for the ACLU. In partnership with experts across the ACLU, the technology team delivers best-in-class solutions, services, and innovation that advance the ACLU mission and organizational priorities. The tech team strives to ensure the ACLU leads by example in the ethical use of technology by ensuring privacy and security standards are maintained, directional insights are used to inform programming and business strategy, best-in-class products are designed to get the ACLU message out into the world and grow the ACLU supporter base, as well as to help steward high standards for algorithmic fairness, accountability, and transparency.
The Product & Engineering division includes engineers, product managers, product designers, and project operations experts who build and maintain engaging digital products and secure technical systems that accelerate the ACLU’s mission as our nationwide guardian of rights and liberties.
This position is part of a collective bargaining unit. It is represented by ACLU Staff United (ASU).

Requirements

• Significant professional experience operating with a high degree of technical ownership and autonomy in a collaborative engineering environment, including improving engineering practices, standards, or team processes
• Significant experience working with Python and AWS to build and maintain data products and services
• Experience implementing automated data validation and quality assurance practices within product data pipelines
• Experience integrating data of varying formats, quality, and volume within cloud data warehouse platforms (e.g., Redshift, Snowflake)
• Experience orchestrating data pipelines using modern workflow frameworks (e.g., Dagster, Airflow)
• Experience developing and maintaining data transformation workflows using modern tooling (e.g., dbt, pandas)
• Experience deploying and managing applications and services in a cloud environment (e.g., AWS, Azure) using infrastructure-as-code tooling (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Experience working with both event-driven and batch-processing architectures
• Strong understanding of software and data engineering best practices, including observability, testing, maintainability, and operational reliability
• Strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with Blackbaud CRM or other fundraising CRMs within a nonprofit environment
• Experience integrating CRM, marketing, advocacy, or digital engagement platforms in complex organizational environments
• Experience managing AWS infrastructure or administering AWS environments
• Experience building or supporting systems related to legal, regulatory, or privacy compliance requirements
• Experience working with identity resolution, entity matching, or constituent data management systems

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain multi-source, multi-destination data pipelines and products
• Work primarily within Dagster, dbt, and the AWS ecosystem, with a strong understanding of the data models, APIs, and operational constraints of our systems and integrations
• Play a key role in the design and implementation of a centralized communications consent management system with a focus on privacy compliance, performance, and extensibility
• Support the migration of our primary fundraising CRM, with a focus on data integrations between Blackbaud CRM and the broader technology ecosystem
• Collaborate closely with engineers and product management to refine technical requirements and translate business objectives into scalable data solutions
• Participate actively in technical design discussions, balancing pragmatism, maintainability, reliability, and delivery timelines
• Proactively identify and mitigate reliability and performance issues; independently investigate, troubleshoot, and resolve complex bugs and operational challenges
• Contribute to agile team processes, including sprint planning, ticket refinement, code reviews, testing, documentation, and release support
• Mentor engineers and contribute to the growth of the team’s technical expertise through collaboration, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing
• Help foster a culture of continuous learning, thoughtful iteration, and engineering excellence

Benefits

• generous paid time-off policy
• comprehensive healthcare benefits (including medical, dental and vision coverage, parental leave, gender affirming care & fertility treatment)
• 401(k) plan and employer match
• annual professional development funds
• internal professional development programs and workshops

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed