Senior Associate - Analytics Engineer
Salary
Salary Range: $124,000 - $177,000
Location
New York, NY (Hybrid)
Posted
Today
The Senior Associate, Analytics Engineer is a practitioner who designs and implements scalable analytics engineering solutions with a high degree of independence. You lead your own workstreams end-to-end — from source alignment and data modeling through testing, deployment, and quality monitoring — engaging with the Analytics Engineering Lead and senior engineers for input on the most complex architectural decisions.
You are technically strong, self-directed, and effective at translating business requirements into well-structured engineering work. You exercise independent judgment in selecting approaches and techniques, engage directly with business stakeholders to understand requirements, and provide input into team-level goals and delivery planning. You advise peers on data modeling and analytics engineering best practices, and actively contribute to improving the team’s SDLC practices.
What you'll do
Pipeline design & data product delivery
- Lead, with support from the Analytics Engineering Lead, the design and implementation of scalable dbt transformation pipelines across Databricks, Postgres and BigQuery — covering layered modeling (staging / intermediate / mart), incremental strategies, and source contract definitions.
- Design and build well-tested, documented data products — dimensional models, aggregates, and feature tables.
- Develop solutions to complex data transformation problems using advanced SQL and Python, selecting the right approach based on evaluation, judgment, and the performance and maintainability requirements of the platform.
- Optimize and tune transformation pipelines for performance, cost efficiency, and incremental processing at scale — independently identifying bottlenecks and driving improvements.
- Own your data products end-to-end: source alignment, modeling, testing, documentation, deployment, and post-release monitoring, with awareness of downstream BI and AI/ML dependencies.
Data quality, governance & SDLC
- Lead, with support from senior engineers, the availability, usability, integrity, and security of data within your domain — ensuring data is consistent, trustworthy, and governed in accordance with enterprise standards.
- Implement robust dbt test frameworks, source freshness checks, and data quality monitoring patterns that make pipeline health observable and failures diagnosable.
- Apply governance standards at the analytics layer: column-level PII tagging, access control integration, and lineage documentation that supports the enterprise data catalog.
- Lead efforts to improve SDLC practices within the team — contributing to and helping establish CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, branching conventions, and PR review standards.
- Maintain data catalog entries for all owned assets: lineage, ownership, grain documentation, and business glossary alignment.
Innovation & pattern development
- Develop and maintain reusable macro libraries and dbt modeling patterns that enforce consistency and accelerate delivery across the analytics engineering surface.
- Participate in semantic layer development — building MetricFlow-based metric definitions that provide a governed, authoritative source of business logic decoupled from downstream consumption.
- Contribute to self-healing pipeline patterns and agentic pipeline construction approaches — prototyping and implementing automated anomaly detection, quality remediation, and LLM-assisted transformation generation.
- Support context graph construction that captures relationships between business entities and data assets, enabling richer AI reasoning and cross-domain signal integration.
- Stay current with the dbt ecosystem, Databricks and BigQuery platform releases, and the broader analytics engineering field — bringing concrete, evaluated recommendations back to the team.
Stakeholder engagement & collaboration
- Engage directly with business stakeholders, data scientists, and ML engineers to understand data requirements — translating them into well-scoped Jira stories with clear acceptance criteria, grain definitions, and delivery estimates.
- Partner with Integration Services on ingestion design to ensure source data arrives in shapes that are transformation-ready, correctly typed, and well-governed before reaching the analytics layer.
- Collaborate with data stewards across NYL to resolve data quality issues at the source — driving shared accountability for data integrity rather than working around upstream problems.
- Communicate technical decisions, modeling trade-offs, and delivery status clearly to the Analytics Engineering Lead and cross-functional partners, adapting style and depth for technical and non-technical audiences.
- Advise junior engineers on data modeling approaches, dbt patterns, SQL craft, and analytics engineering best practices through code review and pair-modeling sessions.
What you'll bring
Required
- 4+ years of progressive data engineering experience with a strong focus on analytics engineering and transformation pipeline development in production cloud environments.
- Strong command of advanced SQL — window functions, CTEs, performance optimization, and complex multi-source joins — and solid Python proficiency for data engineering tasks.
- Hands-on dbt experience: layered modeling, incremental models, source definitions, singular and generic tests, macros, and multi-environment project configuration.
- Experience with cloud data platforms — Databricks and/or BigQuery required; experience with Snowflake or Redshift a plus.
- Understanding of ELT patterns, dimensional modeling, and the design of scalable analytical data products with clear grain, ownership, and consumer contracts.
- Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows: branching strategy, PR review, and CI/CD pipeline integration.
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum delivery environments with structured sprint planning, backlog grooming, and milestone tracking.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills — able to explain technical decisions, document data products, and engage effectively with both engineering and business stakeholders.
Preferred
- Exposure to semantic layer tooling — dbt Semantic Layer / MetricFlow, Looker LookML, or equivalent — and experience building metric definitions consumed by BI or AI systems.
- Familiarity with agentic AI concepts and interest in applying LLM-assisted tooling to pipeline construction, data quality remediation, or transformation pattern generation.
- Experience with data observability tooling (Monte Carlo, Anomalo, or dbt built-in monitoring patterns) and building self-monitoring pipeline patterns.
- Exposure to graph data models, knowledge graphs, or context graph construction for AI or analytics use cases.
- Experience with data catalog and lineage platforms (Dataplex, DataHub, Alation) and column-level governance tagging practices.
- Insurance or financial services industry experience, with familiarity with data privacy standards and enterprise compliance requirements.
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