Junior Data Engineer

Location: Remote

Salary Range: $79,000-$93,000

About Us

BlastPoint is a B2B data analytics startup located in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We give companies the power to solve business problems through discovering the humans in their data and understanding how they think. Serving diverse industries including energy, retail, finance, and transportation, BlastPoint’s software platform helps companies plan solutions to customer-facing challenges, from encouraging green behavior to managing customers’ financial stress. Founded in 2016 by Carnegie Mellon Alumni, we are a tight-knit, forward-thinking team.

Why You Should Work for Us

• Solve Challenging Problems: BlastPoint’s platform incorporates cutting-edge approaches to geospatial data, psychographic clustering, data enrichment and a dynamic visualization environment, all at scale. We’re working to break new ground by pulling insights from high-dimensional data. And we’re pushing ourselves to try new and better ways to approach every step of our process.
• Have An Impact: Small but mighty, BlastPoint’s growth is due to big companies increasingly trusting us with supporting key decisions using their most sensitive data. What we do positively impacts the lives of millions of Americans (and beyond).
• Make Positive Change in the World: Our solutions reduce paper consumption, help struggling families pay their bills, and promote clean energy. We also offer our platform for free to nonprofits and civic-oriented organizations.
• Employee-Focused Culture: We support the individual needs of our team, offering schedule and work-from-home flexibility, health insurance, 401K, and three weeks of PTO. We also tailor growth opportunities, from skills training to industry conferences.
• Equal Opportunity Employer: BlastPoint is committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace, ensuring equal employment opportunities for individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetics.

Job Description

We are seeking a talented Junior Data Engineer to join our expanding engineering team. The ideal candidate for this position combines strong Python and SQL programming skills with a passion for transforming raw data into valuable insights for business use cases. This role focuses on client-facing responsibilities, collaborating closely with customer success, operations, and data scientists to deliver actionable data solutions.

Primary Responsibilities

• Writing efficient server-side Python code, particularly leveraging the pandas DataFrame API and related packages.
• Designing, developing, testing, and maintaining scalable data pipelines to support data aggregation, cleansing, processing, and validation tasks.
• Automating data onboarding and analysis processes to enhance data variety and velocity.
• Integrating client data with various public and private sources.
• Ensuring data integrity and security throughout project lifecycles.
• Exploring data to find potential data quality issues or concerns throughout the data lifecycles.

Professional Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in a field related to data science or data engineering, or 2 years of relevant work experience.
• Strong knowledge of Python, with a focus on pandas
• Proficiency in SQL for data analysis and manipulation, with experience in relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.
• Experience using Git for version control and repository management.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a proactive, can-do mentality, with a demonstrated ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment and manage multiple concurrent projects.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively in cross-functional teams and engage in constructive dialogue to find optimal solutions.
• Keen attention to detail and adaptability, with a willingness to learn new technologies and a critical approach to ensuring data quality.
• Authorized to work in the United States.

Nice to Haves

• Familiarity with utilizing parquet datasets, experience with pyarrow is a plus.
• Familiarity with aggregating in Spark or PySpark
• Basic familiarity with AWS cloud services and a general understanding of their core functionalities
• A working knowledge of common machine learning tools and techniques
• A willingness to travel domestically periodically for company events(roughly 2-4 times per year).