Shed light on description for technical job?

November 28, 2021 12:11 PM

A company gave me, an applicant, a job description. But some of the bullet items are somewhat abstract. Can you put them in more specific and concrete terms for me?

I applied for Job A at Acme Co. The company works with very large datasets, combining, enhancing and analyzing them. It also offers polling and other services.
Acme wrote me back and asked me whether I am interested in Job B. The high point of the pay range for Job A is the low point of the pay range for Job B.

I said yes, I am interested in Job B. I have my first interview on Wednesday.

The job includes validation of source data, data formatting specifications and output requirements, along with audits. The 15-bullet job description also includes:
* Builds data processing workflows to streamline processes.
* Research, acquisition, processing and documentation of available vote history, district and other data types for internal and external client support work and delivery.

But the job description is not as clear as I'd like. Can you help me understand what I would do in Job B?

posted by furtheryet to Work & Money (6 answers total)

It sounds like a business process automation role that involves doing ETL work related to voting history and districts. The links explain as much as I'd venture to guess without more details.
posted by Wobbuffet at 12:23 PM on November 28, 2021

Looks like automating data cleanup and ETL to me, yeah. Got regex, CSV libraries, SQL, and a bit of scripting? You're probably fine.
posted by humbug at 12:55 PM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Sounds like Data Engineering to me.

Data engineering is the practice of designing and building systems for collecting, storing, and analyzing data at scale.

Though since you're more on the ground level, doing the actual collection, storage, and analysis, maybe more of a "data analyst", which all falls under the umbrella of "data science" or just "big data".

You'll be importing large data sets into a big database, Elastic Search, Apache Hive, that sort of thing, and cleaning them, and try to pull insights out of them.
posted by kschang at 2:58 PM on November 28, 2021

This sounds like a data sourcing and cleaning role- qa, data prep. I’m guessing that data analysis is done by another role. This also doesn’t look like data engineering, which is more architecting databases, data warehouses, and lakes.

I’d expect to be focused on obtaining the data, then handing it off to others to maintain and develop the data infrastructure, and a third set of people to do analysis.
posted by jeoc at 8:07 PM on November 28, 2021

Yes its the data mining construct only you'll be compiling usable databases from the sources in your reach. Perhaps designing how they will be used and creating security within them.
posted by The_imp_inimpossible at 2:23 AM on November 29, 2021

Yes, definitely - the first point is to make an agreed plan and/or implements the plan for standard processes, the second to search for and integrate datasets that might be useful and to document them. Sounds like an admin but for data - but it could also be a really good step on the ladder I'd check out what sort of internal hiring they have.
posted by london explorer girl at 8:08 AM on November 29, 2021