Senior Data Engineer – Princeton Accelerator

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Details

Job Type:Contract / FreelanceStart Date:January 21, 2026End Date:June 30, 2026Education:4-Year Degree RequiredExperience Level:Mid-levelCause Areas:Civic Engagement, Conflict Resolution, Policy, Research & Social Science

Description

Building the Telescope into the Information Ecosystem

The Opportunity

The Accelerator at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) is building a first-of-its-kind research platform—a living dataset of social media activity that helps researchers understand how platforms like Telegram and YouTube shape the information environment.

This is greenfield work. We're designing novel data infrastructure from scratch—solving problems without established playbooks, building systems that will define how researchers access social media data at scale.

We're looking for a senior level data engineer to expand and improve the critical data infrastructure: owning architectural decisions, tuning pipelines for performance and cost, expanding our ingestion capabilities (transcripts, sampled media, ML-ready datasets), and establishing engineering standards.

The datasets you help build will accelerate research on pressing social science topics relevant to the social media space that shapes our collective information ecosystem.

The Work

Pipeline Performance & Expansion
Optimize existing Databricks pipelines for cost and performance (we're a lean research operation and DBU-conscious)
- Expand ingestion scope: YouTube transcripts, multi-media sampling, new metadata sources
- Design for ML readiness—researchers and data scientists need gold-layer datasets they can query and model against
Engineering Standards & CI/CD

• Standardize our CI/CD pipelines and integrate them into the product workflow
• Establish patterns for testing, deployment, and monitoring that the team can sustain

• Document what you build so it outlasts your engagement
  Team & Researcher Support

• Work alongside a small engineering team—your experience and mentorship matter

• Collaborate with researchers to understand what they need from the data

• Communicate clearly; we value engineers who can translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders
  What We're Looking For

• Technical leader who can own architectural decisions

• Deep Databricks experience: PySpark, Delta Lake, cost optimization, cluster tuning
• You've designed and built pipelines at scale (10+ TB).
• Deep experience with CI/CD, testing, and what "maintainable" actually means
• Mentor mindset

• Clear communicator who can work with researchers and junior engineers alike
  Extras:

• Experience with social media data, APIs, or unstructured text at scale

• Background in research or academic environments
• Interest in the societal impact of your engineering work

• Azure, GitHub Actions experience
  Structure

• ~30 hours/week, January through June 2026

• Remote; engineering and product team Atlanta, GA area, with research and operations in Princeton, NJ
• Reports to Director of Engineering
• Competitive rate commensurate with experience.
  To Apply

Formal proposals not required, just send the following:

• Your resume (2 pages max, please)
• A few sentences on why this interests you
• One example of a pipeline or system you're proud of building. A link to a GitHub repo or website would be great.
  Email: [email protected]

Deadline: ASAP
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Level of Language Proficiency

english

Location

RemoteWork can be performed from anywhere in United States

Associated Location

Princeton, NJ, USA

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The datasets you help build will accelerate research on pressing social science topics relevant to the social media space that shapes our collective information ecosystem, helping researchers understand how platforms shape the information environment.

Required qualifications:

• Deep Databricks experience with PySpark, Delta Lake, cost optimization, and cluster tuning
• Experience designing and building pipelines at scale (10+ TB)
• Deep experience with CI/CD, testing, and maintainable systems
• Clear communicator who can work with researchers and junior engineers

Competitive rate commensurate with experience. Remote work structure with ~30 hours/week from January through June 2026.

The Accelerator at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) is building a first-of-its-kind research platform—a living dataset of social media activity that helps researchers understand how platforms shape the information environment.