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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, resolving data issues, and prioritizing technical work in collaboration with your State Engagement Managers, Product Managers, Data Analysts, and Software Engineers. 
  • Scope and deploy solutions in partnership with states: collaborate with state IT staff and agency leadership to understand data systems and constraints, define integration approaches, and translate partner needs into clear technical plans.
  • Drive initiatives from backlog to production: independently pick up and complete scoped tickets - from code remappings and raw data documentation to net-new ingest for newly signed states - with appropriate guidance from your technical lead.
  • Act as a feedback loop to product and engineering: bring on-the-ground context from partner deployments back to our core teams, helping to make the platform more robust, configurable, and scalable.
  • Support onboarding of new states: as new partners sign, contribute to ingest scoping and early pipeline work, helping Recidiviz move quickly from signed contract to live data.

Minimum qualifications

  • High empathy and kindness - genuine care for the mission and the people we serve
  • 2+ years of experience building, maintaining, or debugging data pipelines in a production environment
  • Strong proficiency in SQL and relational databases, with an appetite for wrangling large-scale, messy data
  • Solid Python skills - comfortable writing clean, testable scripts and pipeline code
  • Experience working cross-functionally or in a customer-facing capacity, with the ability to communicate technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
  • Comfort with ambiguity: you can explore an undocumented legacy system, form a hypothesis, and write code to test it
  • Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience

Preferred qualifications

  • Experience working with government data systems, legacy enterprise data, or regulated data environments (e.g., CJIS, HIPAA)
  • Familiarity with ETL frameworks, data validation patterns, or cloud data infrastructure (GCP preferred)
  • Experience scoping technical projects or translating business/policy requirements into engineering work
  • Experience with technical integrations: building or consuming REST APIs (OAuth, API keys, pagination, error handling), as well as product integration techniques such as deep linking, and  iframe embedding - experience deploying web-based tools into state or government environments is a plus.
  • Comfort with light full-stack work (React/TypeScript) for configuration or tooling tasks
  • Familiarity with AI coding tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot) - we use these extensively
  • Proximity to one of our state partner capitals is a meaningful plus

Compensation

Compensation is standardized based on roles and responsibilities. This ensures equitable compensation and responsible stewardship of our resources. As such, we do not negotiate compensation offers. 

The compensation for this role is: $97,000

What we offer

  • 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 per year
  • 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
  • 12 weeks of paid parental leave
  • Complimentary One Medical membership (availability based 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 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

More about Recidiviz

Recidiviz was an all-volunteer effort until early 2019, when Clementine, Andrew, and Joshua founded the organization. Since then, we’ve built an A-team of software engineers, designers, product managers and domain experts, from companies like Google, Apple, Dropbox, Opower, and Sidewalk Labs. Recidiviz was part of Y-Combinator’s 2019 class and has received support from some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations, including Ford Foundation, Mackenzie Scott, Schmidt Futures, Arnold Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Mozilla Foundation.

Today, Recidiviz works with (and earns revenue from) over 19 state partners - big and small, red and blue - and touches over 45% of the country’s incarcerated population. We have helped to get hundreds of thousands of people out of the criminal justice system, safely and equitably. In addition to partnering with state Departments of Corrections, Recidiviz collaborates with and learns from partners – from organizations like the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) to community based organizations and justice-impacted individuals, whose perspectives guide our work.

To learn more about how we do what we do, check out our 2025 Year in Review, read some press coverage, or watch our TED Talk. And if you’re really keen to see our work, you can dive into our Github :).

An Important Note

Lasting change is always built on diversity. Recidiviz recruits, employs, trains, compensates, and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, gender identity, and all protected status as required by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a special need that requires accommodation, please let us know in your application. Even if you don't think you meet all the criteria above, drop your resume - you might be great for this role or another role at another time!

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