Overview

The Data Team plays an important role in the Wirecutter’s operations and we’re in need of a talented Data Engineer. Your job will be to develop critical solutions that merge information from disparate systems to deliver insights across the company.

Why you should apply:

As the Data Engineer you will be primarily responsible for designing and maintaining the systems involved in automating the extraction of data from various sources, transforming it, and loading it into a data store ready for use by analysts and business intelligence platforms. Our data is compromised of a unique mix of web analytics, ecommerce, behavioral, content, and product info. By connecting these data sets in a meaningful way your job will help us pioneer new ways of deriving insights from a novel type of content that ultimately helps people easily find the best things to buy.

You will report to the Director of Data Analytics and work alongside a Data Analyst and members of the greater Finance and Analytics group. As part of a small team you’ll be instrumental in leading recommendations on data solutions and building a foundation for future growth. You’ll also be collaborating with engineering, product, business development, editorial, SEO, strategy, production, and deals teams to make sure we have the data needed to answer questions about how we’re best serving our readers and delivering new insights.

About Wirecutter:

Founded five years ago by journalists fed up with the time and energy it takes to shop, Wirecutter developed a simpler approach to giving buying advice: just tell people exactly what to get in one single guide. The company’s purpose: to help people find great things, quickly and easily.  Through rigorous testing, research, reporting, and whatever means necessary, they create straightforward recommendations that save readers from unnecessary stress, time, and effort.  We then monetize these guides by enabling our readers to easily purchase the products they are interested in.

Wirecutter was recently acquired and is now a subsidiary of The New York Times Company.  As part of the acquisition, the Times is investing in Wirecutter to accelerate its business through editorial category expansion, development of more robust product features and unlocking new revenue streams.

Locations:

Even with offices in New York City and Los Angeles, Wirecutter remains a highly remote culture, and open to employing people across the country (and in Canada!).  Right now, we are eligible to hire in AZ, CA, CT, CO, DC, FL, GA, IL, IN, MA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, TX, VA, WA.  If you live outside of these states but are still interested in working with Wirecutter, you are welcome to apply, and we will keep your information on file for future opportunities.

Responsibilities: 

  • Revamping and maintaining our storage and ETL infrastructure and processes to keep pace with best practices and ensuring maximum availability
  • Supporting all teams with a strong foundation of information that ties content, usage, revenue, and promotional intelligence together
  • Writing and maintaining ETL scripts
  • Transitioning our central OLAP data store to BigQuery
  • Creating complex SQL queries to join data in ways that drive insights
  • Documenting our data infrastructure systems and procedures

Qualifications:

  • 3+ years of experience designing and maintaining databases
  • 3+ years of experience developing ETL scripts
  • 2+ years of experience with cloud-based data warehouses like BigQuery or RedShift
  • 1+ year of experience maintaining a BI tool such as Sisense or Chart.io
  • Proficiency in a scripting language such as Python
  • Adept in a SQL query language (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL)
  • Experience with source control management tools like GitHub
  • Experience with web-analytics platforms such as Google Analytics
  • Comfortable communicating technical details in plain language with non-data people
  • Demonstrated ability to improve processes and procedures to optimize accuracy, efficiency, and time
  • Four-year bachelor’s degree or equivalent, preferably in MIS, software engineering, or other data science field
  • Experience with affiliate or e-commerce data a plus

Culture and benefits at The New York Times Company and Wirecutter:

Though Wirecutter has physical locations in both NYC and LA, the company promotes and encourages a remote workforce, so that our employees can work in flexible and comfortable ways.

We are committed to career development, supported by a formal mentoring program as well as tuition reimbursement.  The New York Times Company offers frequent panel discussions and talks by industry leaders (Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates and Ta-Nehisi Coates are a few recent examples), that we encourage our employees to attend.

We believe diversity fuels innovation and creativity, and we have a variety of employee groups and task forces across The New York Times Company and Wirecutter dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.

We offer a generous parental leave policy, which was recently expanded in response to employee feedback.  Birth mothers receive 16 weeks fully paid, adoptive parents and birth fathers receive 10 weeks also fully paid.  Similarly, we offer competitive health and dental insurance, as well as 401k matching.

About The Wirecutter

The Wirecutter, and its associated sites, are about helping people find the best gear to buy using dozens of hours of research of all available sources and our own testing.

What’s different in how we do things is our directness in recommending people exactly what we would buy ourselves or recommend to our loved ones--we don’t ask people who are looking for our advice to click through multiple pages of reviews or meaningless industry news to exploit them for advertising inventory. We just give them our recommendation in a single page, and the evidence of why that is and why they should believe us, and let them them get on with their lives. It's that simple.

You may be aware that we run our company in service of our readers. Less known is our commitment to the people with which we work. We ask everyone who works here to be effective, to be efficient, and to move the needle every day.

In exchange, we offer you the ability to work from wherever on your own hours for competitive pay at a reasonable pace. We love working with people who can get it done in a world-class way and can communicate well with a team, and who know how to enjoy a balanced life outside of work.

Salary and perks: Although we are a small, bootstrapped company, we pride ourselves in offering competitive compensation including, but not limited to, healthcare coverage, PTO, and a flexible work schedule. We want to make sure every employee is happy and has the tools, resources, and knowledge to grow with the company.