Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Recidiviz is hiring a Senior Policy Data Analyst to support state corrections leaders in developing evidence-based policy changes. The role uses administrative data to model policy scenarios, communicate decision-ready findings, and lead analytical projects from scoping through delivery.
Responsibilities
- **Building analysis from corrections and parole data**. You'll use SQL and Python to wrangle administrative data to articulate how a system behaves. You ramp up on new data quickly, going deep where it changes the answer and making defensible simplifying assumptions where it doesn’t
- **Modeling policy scenarios and quantifying tradeoffs**. Apply statistical methods like regressions, time series, stock-and-flow modeling or distributional analysis to project how outcomes change under different policy designs, and assess what the data can and can't support. A core judgment is developing simple and elegant approaches that cut to the heart of the decision point
- **Communicating findings to the people making the decision**. You work backward from what information a stakeholder needs to advance decision-making in the room. You'll create the decks and memos that go to DOC leadership, find the frameworks that make a complicated tradeoff digestible, and take responsibility for tailoring your work to the audience to motivate *action*
- **Running your projects end to end**. You'll translate project objectives into an analysis strategy, set project roadmaps, and identify and address unknowns. You’ll adjust course as project objectives change, and rightsize analysis with impact
- **Collaborating across Recidiviz**. You'll collaborate across the organization to obtain state context, understand underlying data infrastructure, and support policy implementation
- **Finding the next opportunity.** You’ll go deeper on the states you work in — spotting where additional analysis could unlock a decision, and running the early exploration to assess whether it’s worth pursuing
Skills
- 5 or more years of practical experience exploring, analyzing, and processing complex datasets
- Professional experience using SQL with large datasets, including high proficiency writing efficient queries for complex extraction and transformation
- Professional experience with Python, particularly pandas, for statistical analysis and data visualization
- Sufficient statistical background to reason about analysis design, examine results closely, and prepare analyses that hold up to scrutiny
- Experience scoping and delivering analytical work — particularly balancing depth and speed when navigating short timelines and shifting priorities
- Experience on teams where ownership is shared across functions, including proactively seeking context you're missing and flagging risks before they become blockers
- Experience adapting quantitative methods to introduce intuitively meaningful metrics in ambiguous, unconstrained contexts
- Experience working with large administrative datasets from the public sector, especially related to criminal justice
- Familiarity with our data stack, which includes Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, Looker, Jupyter notebooks, and Python/Pandas
Benefits
- Effective, extremely thoughtful colleagues, working together on a mission that matters
- 90% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you and your dependents
- Flexible time off, including 20 days of PTO, 3 days of paid volunteering time, and 13 paid holidays
- 12 weeks of paid parental leave
- 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
- Complimentary One Medical membership (depending on location)
- Partnership with Carrot to provide employees with inclusive fertility and family-forming benefits, as well as a small but growing number of hormonal health and gender-affirming care benefits
- Monthly ClassPass credit for personal wellness
- Free mental health support via Talkspace
- Well-located offices in Oakland and Manhattan, with the flexibility to work remotely or go into either office as you choose
- An annual company offsite each spring and other ad-hoc gatherings
- All the exhilarating challenges and stretch opportunities of a tech startup, combined with the mission-driven heart of a nonprofit
Company Overview