Analytics Engineer

Summary

Niche is the leader in school search, helping people research and enroll in schools through transparent profiles, reviews, ratings, and search tools. The Analytics Engineer will build and support scalable data models, semantic layers, and BI datasets while ensuring data quality, governance, documentation, and performance for business and executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Proactive Business Context & Integration: Actively understand evolving business trends, logic, and cross-functional partnerships to proactively embed rich context and governance into the data layer, ensuring metrics are easily discoverable for consistent decision-making
• Dimensional Modeling Champion: Develop, document, and maintain robust Kimball dimensional models, semantic definitions, warehouse transformation logic, and BI datasets tailored for business analysts and decision-makers
• Semantic Layer and AI Management: Design, build, and maintain clean, version-controlled data models that support semantic layers and support business-wide self-service analytics and reporting
• Observability & Quality Control: Ensure high data quality, business logic consistency, and pipeline accuracy through automated dbt testing, lineage tracking, performance tuning, and proactive alerting systems
• Process Optimization & Scaling: Analyze and improve complex business logic and fragmented queries, turning disparate analyst requests into standardized, well-documented semantic models
• Governance & Security: Integrate essential data governance, metric standardization, and documentation practices, ensuring single-source-of-truth definitions and secure data access across teams
• Build relationships with data team members, understand the operating model, and stakeholders that we interact with on a daily basis
• Start to learn about our data warehouse structure, transformation pipelines, semantic models, and core business metrics
• Start participating in standups, planning, and retrospective meetings
• Start delivering on assigned sprint stories and show progress through completed modeling tasks that contribute to team goals
• Start delivering on assigned analytics engineering tasks to support our semantic layer, reporting needs, and roadmap
• Start troubleshooting data logic issues, modeling errors, and participating in analytics support activities
• Identify areas for improving data transformation processes and semantic definitions, and share with the team
• Contribute consistently towards building our analytics platform, which includes dbt data models, semantic layers, and BI reporting frameworks
• Start to independently own workstreams whether it is periodic analytics engineering activities, or modeling work items in support of our roadmap
• Deepen your understanding, and build domain subject matter expertise of our business metrics & data definitions
• Your contributions have led to us making significant progress in implementing the analytics platform strategy, and key semantic layer initiatives to support company decision-making
• Youve established yourself as a key team member with domain subject matter expertise within analytics engineering

Skills

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field
• 3-5 years of experience in analytics engineering, data engineering or data science
• Demonstrated experience building, testing, and maintaining production-grade data transformation workflows and semantic models
• Practical experience applying dimensional data modeling techniques (Star Schema, Kimball) and using dbt or semantic tools to define, document, and communicate metric logic across teams
• Direct experience modeling business domain data (e.g., Salesforce, Google Analytics, ad platforms), product usage metrics, and semi-structured formats like JSON for BI consumption
• Software engineering mindset applied to data, leading with the principles of version control (Git), automated testing, CI/CD, data modeling techniques (Dimensional Modeling, Data Vault, and Third Normal Form (3NF), and code documentation
• Proficiency in Advanced SQL, dbt, Snowflake, Python, Git, and modern BI tools (e.g., Looker, Tableau)
• Experience working with Google Analytics, Marketing, Ad & Social media platform, CRM/Salesforce, and BI visualization tools; custom semantic metrics will be a plus
• Knowledge and understanding of the modern data stack, and its transformation components - modeling, semantic layers, testing, documentation, governance, and BI integration
• Knowledge of dimensional data modeling techniques (Kimball methodology, Star Schema, Snowflake Schema)
• Self-starter, analytical problem solver, highly attentive to detail, effective communicator, and obsessed with metric standardization and documentation
• Niche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening
• We are currently hiring in states where we currently have employees: AZ, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MO, NE, NV, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WA, DC, WV

Qualifications

Must Haves

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field
• 3-5 years of experience in analytics engineering, data engineering or data science
• Demonstrated experience building, testing, and maintaining production-grade data transformation workflows and semantic models
• Practical experience applying dimensional data modeling techniques (Star Schema, Kimball) and using dbt or semantic tools to define, document, and communicate metric logic across teams
• Direct experience modeling business domain data (e.g., Salesforce, Google Analytics, ad platforms), product usage metrics, and semi-structured formats like JSON for BI consumption
• Software engineering mindset applied to data, leading with the principles of version control (Git), automated testing, CI/CD, data modeling techniques (Dimensional Modeling, Data Vault, and Third Normal Form (3NF), and code documentation
• Proficiency in Advanced SQL, dbt, Snowflake, Python, Git, and modern BI tools (e.g., Looker, Tableau)
• Experience working with Google Analytics, Marketing, Ad & Social media platform, CRM/Salesforce, and BI visualization tools; custom semantic metrics will be a plus
• Knowledge and understanding of the modern data stack, and its transformation components - modeling, semantic layers, testing, documentation, governance, and BI integration
• Knowledge of dimensional data modeling techniques (Kimball methodology, Star Schema, Snowflake Schema)
• Self-starter, analytical problem solver, highly attentive to detail, effective communicator, and obsessed with metric standardization and documentation
• Niche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening
• We are currently hiring in states where we currently have employees: AZ, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MO, NE, NV, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WA, DC, WV

Benefits

• Participation in our Annual Bonus and Stock Option Program
• Fully flexible workforce empowering employees to choose to work remotely, in our Pittsburgh office or whatever combination suits them
• 100% paid employee health plan, including vision and dental and supplemental coverage
• Flexible Paid Time Off Policy
• Stipend that allows you to build your work from home office in a style and function that suits your personal preferences
• Parental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid)
• Short term disability for birthing parents
• 401(k) with employer match
• Your ideas and work will make an immediate impact on our company and millions of users
• You will join a team that cares about you, our mission, our work - and celebrates our wins together!