Analytics Engineer

About Niche

Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. With in-depth profiles on every school and college in America, 140 million reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them. We also help thousands of schools recruit more best-fit students, by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply.

Niche is all about finding where you belong, and that mission inspires how we operate every day. We want Niche to be a place where people truly enjoy working and can thrive professionally.

About The Role

We are looking for a skilled Analytics Engineer to join the Data Engineering team. You’ll build and support scalable data models that translate raw data into clean, business-ready datasets while ensuring data accuracy, documentation, observability, semantic consistency, and optimum performance. You’ll be developing and maintaining modular dbt models, semantic layers, and BI views for consumption by business analysts and executive stakeholders. This is an exciting opportunity to join our team as we’re building the next generation of our analytics platform and semantic capabilities. You’ll be reporting to the Manager, Data Engineering (Core).

What You Will Do

• Proactive Business Context & Integration: Actively understand evolving business trends, logic, and cross-functional partnerships to proactively embed rich context and governance into the data layer, ensuring metrics are easily discoverable for consistent decision-making
• Dimensional Modeling Champion: Develop, document, and maintain robust Kimball dimensional models, semantic definitions, warehouse transformation logic, and BI datasets tailored for business analysts and decision-makers
• Semantic Layer and AI Management: Design, build, and maintain clean, version-controlled data models that support semantic layers and support business-wide self-service analytics and reporting
• Observability & Quality Control: Ensure high data quality, business logic consistency, and pipeline accuracy through automated dbt testing, lineage tracking, performance tuning, and proactive alerting systems
• Process Optimization & Scaling: Analyze and improve complex business logic and fragmented queries, turning disparate analyst requests into standardized, well-documented semantic models
• Governance &  Security: Integrate essential data governance, metric standardization, and documentation practices, ensuring single-source-of-truth definitions and secure data access across teams

During the First Month:

• Build relationships with data team members, understand the operating model, and stakeholders that we interact with on a daily basis
• Start to learn about our data warehouse structure, transformation pipelines, semantic models, and core business metrics
• Start participating in standups, planning, and retrospective meetings
• Start delivering on assigned sprint stories and show progress through completed modeling tasks that contribute to team goals

Within 3 Months:

• Start delivering on assigned analytics engineering tasks to support our semantic layer, reporting needs, and roadmap
• Start troubleshooting data logic issues, modeling errors, and participating in analytics support activities
• Identify areas for improving data transformation processes and semantic definitions, and share with the team

Within 6 Months:

• Contribute consistently towards building our analytics platform, which includes dbt data models, semantic layers, and BI reporting frameworks
• Start to independently own workstreams whether it is periodic analytics engineering activities, or modeling work items in support of our roadmap
• Deepen your understanding, and build domain subject matter expertise of our business metrics & data definitions

Within 12 Months:

• Your contributions have led to us making significant progress in implementing the analytics platform strategy, and key semantic layer initiatives to support company decision-making
• You’ve established yourself as a key team member with domain subject matter expertise within analytics engineering

What We Are Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field
• 3-5 years of experience in analytics engineering, data engineering or data science
• Demonstrated experience building, testing, and maintaining production-grade data transformation workflows and semantic models
• Practical experience applying dimensional data modeling techniques (Star Schema, Kimball) and using dbt or semantic tools to define, document, and communicate metric logic across teams
• Direct experience modeling business domain data (e.g., Salesforce, Google Analytics, ad platforms), product usage metrics, and semi-structured formats like JSON for BI consumption
• Software engineering mindset applied to data, leading with the principles of version control (Git), automated testing, CI/CD, data modeling techniques (Dimensional Modeling, Data Vault, and Third Normal Form (3NF), and code documentation
• Proficiency in Advanced SQL, dbt, Snowflake, Python, Git, and modern BI tools (e.g., Looker, Tableau)
• Experience working with Google Analytics, Marketing, Ad & Social media platform, CRM/Salesforce, and BI visualization tools; custom semantic metrics will be a plus
• Knowledge and understanding of the modern data stack, and its transformation components - modeling, semantic layers, testing, documentation, governance, and BI integration
• Knowledge of dimensional data modeling techniques (Kimball methodology, Star Schema, Snowflake Schema)
• Self-starter, analytical problem solver, highly attentive to detail, effective communicator, and obsessed with metric standardization and documentation

Compensation 

Our national target base salary range is $96,000-$120,000, plus participation in our Annual Bonus and Stock Option Program. Base compensation will be commensurate with experience and skills.

At Niche, our Total Rewards Philosophy is centered around creating a workplace environment that attracts, motivates, and retains top talent by providing a comprehensive and competitive rewards package.  This philosophy is built on the principles of performance-based compensation, best-in-class benefits and work-life balance, and employee well-being.

Interview Process

Candidate experience is a top priority for our talent and hiring teams.  We believe in providing a transparent, authentic and comprehensive interview process where you have the opportunity to learn about us while we get to know you and your experience.  The interview process is outlined here:

• Phone Screen with Talent Acquisition Partner - 30 Minutes

• Video Interview with Hiring Manager - 30 Minutes

• Team Interview - 30 Minutes

• Technical Interview - 30 Minutes

Why Niche?

• We are a fully flexible workforce empowering our employees to choose to work remotely, in our Pittsburgh office or whatever combination suits you
• Full time, salaried position with competitive compensation in a fast-growing company
• Best-in-class 100% paid employee health plan, including vision and dental and supplemental coverage
• Flexible Paid Time Off Policy
• Stipend that allows you to build your work from home office in a style and function that suits your personal preferences
• Parental leave for all employees (12 weeks fully paid) in addition to short term disability for birthing parents
• Meaningful 401(k) with employer match
• Your ideas and work will make an immediate impact on our company and millions of users
• You will join a team that cares about you, our mission, our work - and celebrates our wins together!

Niche will only employ those who are legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future for this opening.  

We are currently hiring in states where we currently have employees: AZ, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MO, NE, NV, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WA, DC, WV.

Candidates only.  No recruiters or agencies, please. Sorry, we do not offer relocation assistance.

Niche is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. Therefore, we provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry,  marital status, affectional or sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, nationality, sex, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law.

All interviews are being held remotely. If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.