"Data Engineer, Penn Wharton Budget Model"

Job Description Summary

Wharton School Overview
Founded in 1881 as the world's first collegiate business school, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is shaping the future of business by incubating ideas, driving insights, and creating leaders who change the world. With campuses in both Philadelphia and San Francisco, Wharton has over 850 staff, a faculty population of more than 235 renowned professors, and 5,000 undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral students. Each year 13,000 professionals from around the world advance their careers through Wharton Executive Education's individual, company-customized, and online programs. More than 104,000 Wharton alumni form a powerful global network of leaders who transform business every day. Wharton is home to a dynamic community of staff, bringing a wide range of skills, experiences, and perspectives. To learn more, visit www.wharton.upenn.edu.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM) is a non-partisan, research-based initiative that provides analysis to policymakers to assess the effects of policy on budgetary outcomes (government revenues and costs) and various economic variables. PWBM's work is widely cited and has been influential in many key recent policy discussions, including tax reform, budget reconciliation, immigration, Social Security, health care, infrastructure, pre-K education, paid family leave, universal income, and the federal debt. The PWBM team consists of roughly 30 Ph.D. economists, policy analysts, research analysts, software engineers, and developers.

PWBM has a unique model - even relative to other scoring entities - that relies on a workflow between data processing, microsimulation (which utilizes large-scale Monte Carlo simulations), dozens of policy modules (including several tax calculators), and a large-scale stochastic macroeconomic overlapping generations (OLG) lifecycle model. An extensive code base, mostly in Python, underlies this workflow, and the model utilizes cutting-edge economic modeling, data science, machine learning, and cloud computing to project policy impacts. The models are frequently updated to reflect the latest economics and empirical research, and many of them require (large) datasets to calibrate them. PWBM is currently building a model automation pipeline to automate the forecasting process.

The Data Engineer will be a member of the software engineering team and work closely with PWBM domain experts - economists, policy analysts, and research analysts - responsible for building and calibrating models using large, publicly and privately available datasets. The Data Engineer will design, build, and maintain the data infrastructure with the software engineering team; establish best practices for data ingestion and storage; and coach domain experts to write maintainable extract-transform-load (ETL) code. The Data Engineer will also contribute their expertise and insights to the model automation project to help make the automation pipeline robust to data changes.

*Position contingent upon funding.

Job Description

Job Responsibilities

• The data engineer will work with the software engineering team to design, build, and maintain data infrastructure that houses data obtained from external sources and PWBM model output and enables PWBM and external collaborators easy access to information that is versioned, accurate, and consistent.
• Establish best practices for data ingestion, storage, and retrieval. Work with PWBM domain experts to implement best practices in extract-transform-load (ETL) code, including producing readable, modular, and testable code.
• Help the Director of Engineering and Data and domain experts plan future infrastructure development.
• Mentor junior engineers, research analysts, and graduate students.
• Perform additional duties as assigned

Qualifications

Required Skills/Experience:

• A bachelor's degree in a relevant field, such as computer science, software engineering, statistics, mathematics, or engineering; and 3-5 years of experience; or equivalent.
• More than 2 years of post-degree experience as a data engineer in a team setting, and familiarity with current cloud data storage options, data modeling, data extraction (e.g., web scraping or using web APIs), automation (e.g., pipelining), and alerting/monitoring with process insights in mind.
• Demonstrated ability to write readable, modular, and testable code.
• Experience with modern software engineering best practices (e.g. automated testing, pair programming, and continuous integration).
• Solid ability to understand mathematical and statistical models.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to collaborate successfully with teammates who have diverse technical backgrounds. The data engineer will work with individuals across a range of technical experience levels, so the candidate should be able to distill their thoughts into non-technical terms.
• Experience working with LLM-based coding tools.
• Experience with data frame packages/libraries in any programming language.
• Solid ability to identify requirements from discussions with domain experts and parse them into smaller stories/tasks.

Preferred Skills:

• Knowledge of Python and pandas.
• Experience working with survey data or other microdata.
• Familiarity with major economic and demographic data sources (e.g. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis).
• Experience working with data scientists or economists.
• Formal training in economics, public policy, or in quantitative disciplines such as statistics, engineering, and mathematics.

Additional Information

Staff positions at the Penn Wharton Budget Model are funded by external gifts and grants. This position is contingent upon both the continued availability of funding sources and the ongoing need for the role. It is an initial two-year term position, with potential renewal at the discretion of the faculty director. The position may be discontinued if funding sources are no longer available, if suitable replacement funding sources are not identified, or if the need for the position ceases to exist.

Job Location - City, State
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Department / School
Wharton School

Pay Range
$83,500.00 - $130,000.00 Annual Rate
Salary offers are made based on the candidate's qualifications, experience, skills, and education as they directly relate to the requirements of the position, and in alignment with salary ranges based on external market data for the job's level. Internal organization and peer data at Penn are also considered.