Implementation Engineer

Summary

Recidiviz is a nonprofit organization focused on improving outcomes for individuals in the criminal justice system. They are seeking an Implementation Engineer to build and maintain data pipelines, manage relationships with state partners, and drive initiatives from backlog to production.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain state data ingest pipelines: write Python and SQL to ingest, normalize, and validate raw criminal justice data from state partners into Recidiviz's platform, handling messy schemas, legacy formats, and evolving data feeds
• Own your state portfolio end-to-end: serve as the primary technical owner for 1–2 state partners, managing ingest quality, resolving data issues, and prioritizing technical work in collaboration with your State Engagement Managers, Product Managers, Data Analysts, and Software Engineers
• Scope and deploy solutions in partnership with states: collaborate with state IT staff and agency leadership to understand data systems and constraints, define integration approaches, and translate partner needs into clear technical plans
• Drive initiatives from backlog to production: independently pick up and complete scoped tickets - from code remappings and raw data documentation to net-new ingest for newly signed states - with appropriate guidance from your technical lead
• Act as a feedback loop to product and engineering: bring on-the-ground context from partner deployments back to our core teams, helping to make the platform more robust, configurable, and scalable
• Support onboarding of new states: as new partners sign, contribute to ingest scoping and early pipeline work, helping Recidiviz move quickly from signed contract to live data

Skills

• High empathy and kindness - genuine care for the mission and the people we serve
• 2+ years of experience building, maintaining, or debugging data pipelines in a production environment
• Strong proficiency in SQL and relational databases, with an appetite for wrangling large-scale, messy data
• Solid Python skills - comfortable writing clean, testable scripts and pipeline code
• Experience working cross-functionally or in a customer-facing capacity, with the ability to communicate technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort with ambiguity: you can explore an undocumented legacy system, form a hypothesis, and write code to test it
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience
• Experience working with government data systems, legacy enterprise data, or regulated data environments (e.g., CJIS, HIPAA)
• Familiarity with ETL frameworks, data validation patterns, or cloud data infrastructure (GCP preferred)
• Experience scoping technical projects or translating business/policy requirements into engineering work
• Experience with technical integrations: building or consuming REST APIs (OAuth, API keys, pagination, error handling), as well as product integration techniques such as deep linking, and iframe embedding - experience deploying web-based tools into state or government environments is a plus
• Comfort with light full-stack work (React/TypeScript) for configuration or tooling tasks
• Familiarity with AI coding tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot) - we use these extensively
• Proximity to one of our state partner capitals is a meaningful plus

Qualifications

Must Haves

• High empathy and kindness - genuine care for the mission and the people we serve
• 2+ years of experience building, maintaining, or debugging data pipelines in a production environment
• Strong proficiency in SQL and relational databases, with an appetite for wrangling large-scale, messy data
• Solid Python skills - comfortable writing clean, testable scripts and pipeline code
• Experience working cross-functionally or in a customer-facing capacity, with the ability to communicate technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort with ambiguity: you can explore an undocumented legacy system, form a hypothesis, and write code to test it
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience

Nice to Haves

• Experience working with government data systems, legacy enterprise data, or regulated data environments (e.g., CJIS, HIPAA)
• Familiarity with ETL frameworks, data validation patterns, or cloud data infrastructure (GCP preferred)
• Experience scoping technical projects or translating business/policy requirements into engineering work
• Experience with technical integrations: building or consuming REST APIs (OAuth, API keys, pagination, error handling), as well as product integration techniques such as deep linking, and iframe embedding - experience deploying web-based tools into state or government environments is a plus
• Comfort with light full-stack work (React/TypeScript) for configuration or tooling tasks
• Familiarity with AI coding tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot) - we use these extensively
• Proximity to one of our state partner capitals is a meaningful plus

Benefits

• 90% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you and your dependents
• Flexible time off, including 20 days of PTO, 3 days of paid volunteering time, and 13 paid holidays per year
• 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Complimentary One Medical membership (availability based on location)
• Partnership with Carrot to provide employees with inclusive fertility and family-forming benefits, as well as a small but growing number of hormonal health and gender-affirming care benefits
• Monthly ClassPass credit for personal wellness
• Free mental health support via Talkspace
• Well-located offices in Oakland and Manhattan, with the flexibility to work remotely or go into either office as you choose
• An annual company offsite and other ad-hoc gatherings