Junior Data Analyst
Azavea
Overview
Azavea is a civic technology firm based in Philadelphia that uses geospatial data to build software and data analytics for the web. As a B Corporation, we’re committed to working on projects that have civic, social, and environmental impact and advancing the state-of-the-art through research. Most of our customers are local governments, non-profit organizations and academic or federal research projects. We perform geospatial analysis and visualization; build custom web software and SaaS products; and manage several open source civic software projects (OpenTreeMap, GeoTrellis, DistrictBuilder, and others).
What you’ll do
The Data Analytics team works on geospatial data analysis and visualization projects for public, non-profit and private sector clients; supports the data processing needs of our software engineering teams; implements online mapping projects with CARTO, ArcGIS Online, and MapBox; promotes growth of our data science and analytics business; and organizes and manages the Summer of Maps program.
What do we mean by a ‘Data Analyst’? We are looking for a person who combines a mix of talents, skills, and common sense. While we have a fairly open-ended definition for this position and realize that many types of individuals could be a good fit, we are looking for someone with a strong technical background and a passionate interest in data science, statistics, and data visualization; attention to detail; strong communication, writing and networking skills.
Our company and team are growing, but we are looking for someone to help to increase our capacity to undertake visualization and data science projects on our Data Analytics team. This position will include the following activities:
- Support analytic professional services projects through:
- Developing analytics to address data science needs and opportunities
- Performing exploratory and targeted data analyses using descriptive statistics and other methods
- Conducting data quality assessments and data cleansing
- Visualizing analysis results, historical data, and patterns
- Support analytical work on other teams when needed
- Write and publish Python and/or R scripts
- Provide mentorship for students on analysis projects for the Summer of Maps fellowship
- WRite and edit reports for research grants, projects, and proposals
- Improve our ability to respond to and implement sophisticated projects in emerging technologies and statistical methods
- Share the team’s work through blogs, talks, and other content marketing
- Remain current on emerging trends, tools, and technologies in the industry
You should have:
- Coursework and/or experience in data processing, algorithms, math, statistics, and machine learning
- Fluency with R and/or Python
- Interest in building and applying machine learning / predictive modeling in real-world use cases
- Possess good understanding of relational databases and SQL
- Understand how to use web API’s
- Working knowledge of GitHub
- Experience with data visualizations, both interactive and static
- Strong writing skills and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to write and speak about technical topics to both colleagues and non-technical audiences
- Interest in connecting with people by learning about their projects, sharing your work, and meeting new people
- Demonstrated ability to work on projects independently and collaboratively in a small team environment
- Resourcefulness and attention to detail
- Internal motivation, with the ability to take responsibility for your tasks when working either autonomously or collaboratively
- A strong sense of ethics and responsibility and a passion for doing meaningful work to the highest standard
You get extra points for:
- Experience with contemporary desktop mapping platforms such as ArcGIS and/or QGIS
- Experience with contemporary web mapping platforms such as ArcGIS Online, CARTO, and MapBox
- Understanding of basic web technology concepts (e.g. JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.)
- Understanding of open data portals and the ability to access data programmatically
- Understanding techniques for working productively with very large data sets (via Hadoop, GDAL, PostGIS and similar systems)
- Demonstrating your commitment to community service or open source projects
Office and Benefits
Our Philadelphia office is located in a brightly lit office on the 5th floor of a converted factory building in the Callowhill neighborhood, a short walk from Center City, the Reading Terminal Market and SEPTA subway and regional rail stations. For bicyclists, we have in-house bike parking, showers and lockers. It’s an open office plan with lots of smaller rooms for team meetings, private space and concentration time. You get a top-end Mac or Windows laptop or workstation and extra monitors. We have flex-time to deal with personal stuff, and most people work a 40 – 45 hour week on a regular schedule. After the first six months, we encourage folks to spend up to 10% of their time on learning, professional development, open source, or a research project. For example, some of our colleagues are contributors to the PostGIS, OpenLayers, GDAL and GeoTrellis projects. Other learning and research projects have included improving dev ops tool chains; working with Spark to develop machine learning tools; and hijacking GPUs for raster data processing. Learning projects can take many forms, but the important thing is that we want to see people pushing their professional skills forward in a meaningful way.
We offer a salary commensurate with skills and experience and a benefits package that includes:
- Fully subsidized health care, dental, prescription plan, including for spouse/partner and children
- Fully subsidized life and long term disability insurance, plus voluntary short term disability insurance
- Medical reimbursement plan to cover what the health insurance does not
- Retirement plan with matching percentage
- Almost 4 weeks paid vacation plus sick/personal time off
- Family and medical leave
- Flexible work schedule
- Paid maternity and paternity leave
- Child care subsidy
- Paid time off for voting and volunteering
- Education assistance plan
- Student loan assistance
- Public transit and biking reimbursement plans
- Monthly guest speaker series
- 10% time for Research or Training Projects
- Profit-sharing bonus plan
- Financial transparency through an open book policy
- Kind, capable and thoughtful colleagues
We welcome qualified candidates from all walks of life and value diversity in our company, and we prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, military service, disability unrelated to job requirements, marital status, or domestic partner status.
Full Time