Implementation Engineer

Remote, NYC office, or Oakland office Location: Remote, New York City, or Oakland, CA

Travel Requirement: Occasional travel (estimated 10%) to visit state partner sites for onboarding, relationship-building, and technical scoping. Travel is typically planned in advance and clustered around key milestones (e.g., new state launch, initiative kick-off).

Role Type: Full-time Compensation: $97,000 Visa sponsorship: Not available Hires remotely in: United States Experience: 2+ years Skills: SQL, Google Cloud Platform, Python, Relationship Building Recidiviz is thrilled to be hiring an Implementation Engineer to join our team! We’re a small, fast-moving group that partners with state governments to identify opportunities for impact in the criminal justice space. That’s where you come in. We’re looking for an empathetic, fast learner who is excited to own relationships with our state partners’ data teams and prepare raw data for analytics and product development.

About us

Recidiviz is creating safer, healthier communities by improving outcomes for people in the criminal justice system. We build technology to safely reduce the number of people in prison and to help criminal justice leaders embrace data-driven decision-making. We work side-by-side with leaders of the criminal justice system, people in prison and on supervision, and ecosystem partners to build a better path forward. People who succeed at Recidiviz lead with kindness and humility, assume good intent, learn from failure, and fix problems when they see them. They build deep relationships with and genuine empathy for the people we work with and the people our mission serves.

About the role

As an Implementation Engineer, you sit at the intersection of engineering and partner success. You are part of the technical bridge between Recidiviz's core engineering platform and our state partners - writing the code that gets messy, real-world criminal justice data flowing reliably into our systems, while working closely with state agencies, SEMs, and product teams to define what gets built and why. This role blends hands-on ingest engineering (building and maintaining data pipelines for state partners) with a meaningful customer-facing dimension: scoping technical approaches with state IT staff, surfacing insights that shape product direction, and building the kind of trust that turns a state DOC into a long-term Recidiviz champion. You should be comfortable moving fluidly between deep technical work and clear stakeholder communication. Travel Requirement: Occasional travel (estimated 10%) to visit state partner sites for onboarding, relationship-building, and technical scoping. Travel is typically planned in advance and clustered around key milestones (e.g., new state launch, initiative kick-off).

Core responsibilities

Build and maintain state data ingest pipelines: write Python and SQL to ingest, normalize, and validate raw criminal justice data from state partners into Recidiviz's platform, handling messy schemas, legacy formats, and evolving data feeds.
Own your state portfolio end-to-end: serve as the primary technical owner for 1–2 state partners,... managing ingest quality,... prioritizing technical work collaboratively.
Scope & deploy solutions partnering states: collaborate with IT staff & leadership...
Drive initiatives backlog to production: independently complete scoped tickets...
Act as feedback loop product & engineering: bring deployment context back...
Support onboarding new states: contribute early pipeline work...

Minimum qualifications

High empathy & kindness - genuine care for mission & people served
2+ years experience building/maintaining/debugging production data pipelines
Strong proficiency SQL & relational databases; appetite wrangling large-scale messy data
Solid Python skills - writing clean/testable scripts & pipeline code
Experience cross-functional/customer-facing; communicate technical concepts clearly
Comfort ambiguity: explore undocumented legacy systems; form hypotheses; write test code
Bachelor's degree technical field or equivalent experience

Preferred qualifications

Experience government data systems/legacy enterprise/regulated environments (CJIS/HIPAA)
Familiarity ETL frameworks/data validation/cloud infra (GCP preferred)
Experience scoping projects/translating business/policy requirements into engineering work
Experience technical integrations: REST APIs (OAuth/API keys/pagination/error handling), product integration techniques like deep linking/iframe embedding; deploying web tools government environments plus.
Comfort light full-stack work (React/TypeScript) config/tooling tasks
Familiarity AI coding tools (Claude/Cursor/Copilot)
Proximity one of our state partner capitals meaningful plus

Compensation

Compensation standardized based on roles/responsibilities ensuring equitable compensation/responsible stewardship resources. Compensation for this role: $97 ,000

What we offer

Effective/extremely thoughtful colleagues working together on mission that matters
90% medical/dental/vision insurance coverage you/dependents
Flexible time off including 20 days PTO/3 days paid volunteering/13 paid holidays per year
401(k) retirement plan w/5% company match/no vesting period
12 weeks paid parental leave
Complimentary One Medical membership (location-based availability)
Partnership Carrot provide employees inclusive fertility/family-forming benefits plus hormonal health/gender affirming care benefits growing number small but growing number hormonal health/gender affirming care benefits.
Monthly ClassPass credit personal wellness
Free mental health support via Talkspace
Well-located offices Oakland & Manhattan w/flexibility remote or office choice
Annual company offsite & other ad-hoc gatherings
Exhilarating challenges/stretch opportunities tech startup combined mission-driven heart nonprofit