Senior Data and Analytics Architect

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Accelerate Learning, creators of STEMscopes, is an award-winning, research-based national leader in PreK-12 STEM curriculum. Used by over 6M students across all 50 states and internationally, STEMscopes provides comprehensive digital resources, supplemental print materials, and hands-on exploration kits that drive engagement and academic growth. It is a cloud based, SaaS platform offering all lesson plans, teacher and student resources and assessment systems with real-time feedback portal. The curriculum is tailored to state-specific standards and is scalable for instructional use in 1-to-1, blended and traditional classrooms.

Accelerate Learning was founded within Rice University and spun out into a stand-alone company in 2013. The company has grown from a single product to a nationwide brand that now offers a variety of STEM curriculum and professional development solutions to support early learning, NGSS, and state-aligned Math and Science curriculum. STEMscopes was incubated in the classroom and developed by over 200 teachers, science experts, and science professors. Each summer the company hosts teachers for a writing camp to develop content and curriculums, field test lessons and assessment items, and review and edit all materials to ensure factual accuracy, so curriculums are current and practical for implementation in any type of classroom.

The STEMscopes program promotes collaboration, listening, and expression in a variety of styles through purposeful discussions that broaden students’ mindsets and encourage educational growth. The solutions provide a powerful, interactive curriculum that encourages students to rely on critical thinking, compelling reflection, and collaborative exploration within each scope.

Accelerate Learning's world-class solutions have earned accolades from numerous industry programs, including the 2021 Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence, 2021 EdTech Digest Cool Tool Awards, 2021 Educators Pick Best of STEM Awards, 2021 CODiE Awards, and more. Accelerate is majority-owned by The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s leading Private Equity firms with over $220B in assets under management, along with minority investors Quad Partners, a NYC-based investment firm with a focus on Education and Technology, Owl Ventures, a leading EdTech-focused venture capital firm, and Rice Management Company.

POSITION SUMMARY

The Senior Data and Analytics Architect will own the Data and Analytics Architecture and Roadmap for Accelerate Learning’s industry leading Science and Math digital education systems. In this role, you will document the current database architecture and analytics tool portfolio, create a future state architecture recommendation, and develop a roadmap to bridge the difference. You will review database technology selections for cost, performance, scalability, and fit to purpose. You will recommend how we re-architect current databases, grow from today’s designs and technologies, and evolve to an industry leading data enabled platform. You will select a portfolio of analytics tools based on costs, performance, ease of use, platform integration, and scalability. You will make sure that Accelerate Learning has a strong Data and Analytics architecture to be the leader in “data enabled” STEM Education.

POSITION RESPONSIBILITIES

Data Architecture Definition

• Document the current state of Accelerate Learning’s data models, technologies, and analytic tools
• Create a future state, target architecture, integrating together multiple current data platforms into an industry leading “data enabled” digital education system.
• Create a high-performance data reporting environment with appropriate analytics tools to deliver the type of educational reports, dashboards, and insights that our customers and business need.
• Create a prioritized data roadmap to drive our migration to the future state architecture
• Where appropriate, integrate modern Machine Learning tools and practices into our data architecture
• Partner with Product Management teams to make sure that data architecture produces capabilities that meet or exceed customer expectations.

Database Technology Selection

• Examining the current database technologies, the needs and future directions of our products, and the state of industry technologies available:
• Create a prioritized criteria list for choosing database technologies
• Where new technologies are being introduced, create a migration and implementation plan for the technology team.
  

Database Pipeline Tools

• Evaluating the current data environment at Accelerate Learning, recommend the appropriate data pipeline architecture and tools for the organization.

  Analytics Tools

• Based on the need to create meaningful insights for Educators, administrators, teachers, parents, and students – choose an appropriate set of analytics tools that will deliver on these needs.

  Integration of Data and Analytics with Education Platform Solutions

• Successfully integrating a data and analytics technology stack with our educational platforms in a seamless and high-performance way will be an important objective for the Senior Data & Analytics Architect.

POSITION QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s Degree in computer science, information management, knowledge management, data science or related field.
• Datawarehouse design / analytics development experience with multiple analytics platforms
• Development of SQL stored procedures, performance tuning (SQL server and Snowflake for example) – Advanced level
• Developing data / information management artifacts including source to target mappings, data models (dimensional, columnar), data dictionaries and metadata management practices

• Providing design leadership to enterprise and cross functional teams
• Working in cloud data environments such as snowflake and AWS
• Modern data architecture tools and technologies including graph databases, metadata practices, streaming and machine learning data preparation
• Excellent written communication and presentation skills to inform and influence technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Knowledge of data application development or integration is a plus
• Experience migrating from on-prem to cloud data warehouse such as SQL server to snowflake is a plus
• Understanding of Apache Hadoop and the Hadoop ecosystem
• Experience with one or more relevant tools (Sqoop, Flume, Kafka, Oozie, Hue, Zookeeper, HCatalog, Solr, Avro)
• Familiarity with one or more SQL-on-Hadoop technology (Hive, Impala, Spark SQL, Presto)
• Experience developing software code in one or more programming languages (Java, JavaScript, Python, etc)
• Current hands-on implementation experience required