Lead Analytics Engineer (Contractor)

About the role

This contractor position lets you shape Newsela’s data ecosystem by building robust pipelines, applying modern software engineering practices, and driving data‑driven decision‑making across product, finance, marketing, and engineering teams.

Key responsibilities

• Set technical direction for the analytics team, including architecture, conventions, and approach.
• Own the architecture of data models and the semantic layer, ensuring long‑term maintainability and governed self‑service.
• Partner with stakeholders to translate business needs into a clear roadmap and negotiate scope.
• Define and govern data testing strategy, operational health, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Mentor junior engineers, conduct code/design reviews, and lead large‑scale migrations and performance initiatives.

Required profile

• 8+ years of experience working with data in a software environment.
• Proven ability to work autonomously, proactively, and lead technical teams.
• Deep domain knowledge of data analysis, data systems, and business semantic layers.

Required skills

• Advanced SQL and Python.
• Experience with dbt orchestration and best practices.
• Familiarity with DAG tooling such as Dagster or Airflow.
• Knowledge of relational datastores, document/graph/schema‑less databases.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and IaC tools like Terraform.
• Proficiency with Tableau and data catalog / integrity testing frameworks.