Senior Data Engineer, Princeton Accelerator (Contract)

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: info@researchaccelerator.org

Deadline: ASAP

Source: Idealist