Guide to writing data, analytics engineer, and data analyst job descriptions

Congratulations! You’re a manager! And, you’re building a data team! How exciting! Now what?

Time to build an analytics team! But that’s easier said than done. Attracting the right people to your job openings is hard, especially in an industry that moves as fast as this one. This makes being intentional with your job descriptions as important as ever. 

In the last year, I’ve helped hire over 20 data analysts, analytics engineers, and data engineers. What follows is from my experience hiring for many data roles, across different companies of various sizes.

The four roles at the core of your data team #

When thinking about building a data team at a small or medium-sized organization, there are primarily four buckets of roles that you want to consider: 

• data analysts
• analytics engineers 
• data engineers 
• machine learning engineers

While the data scientist title is trendy, it is also ambiguous. Some data scientists are data analysts, and some are machine learning engineers. Avoiding that sort of catch-all will help manage expectations both within your organization, and with candidates whom you’re interviewing.

Data analyst

The hardest part of data is managing stakeholders, so in many ways data analysts have the hardest job.

The work of analysts can be split along a 2x2 characterization: projects can be circular or linear and proactive or reactive.

As a leader, it is your goal to maximize the amount of time that your analysts are producing proactive work. Let’s look at some examples of projects in each bucket:

	Circular	Linear
Proactive	Iterating over your user activation moment, to identify the best leading indicator for conversion.	Understanding what caused a spike in traffic to a specific web asset on a given day in the past.
Reactive	Answering a question for an executive, that leads to another question.	Answering a usage question for a PM, so they can prioritize which feature to build next.

Analytics engineer

These are the folks who work with data within your ecosystem and prepare it for analysis. You can think of them as data librarians.

Part of the nature of being a growing organization means that everyone has to be willing to do different kinds of work, including analyses. For example, if UI-based data sync tools (FiveTran etc) are available for your data sources, analytics engineers may perform the work of data engineers to sync data to the warehouse. Analytics engineers will often own the design of the data warehouse.

Data engineer

Data engineers are the people who move data from outside of your ecosystem into your ecosystem. They are responsible for your infrastructure and data plumbing.

Responsibilities for these folks might include: keeping your dbt instance on the latest version, managing snowflake permissions, managing and writing airflow pipelines, and maintaining the CI/CD pipeline for your repo.

Machine learning engineer

Machine learning engineers focus on building machine learning models and deploying them to production.

Especially at the early stages of a team, it is important to have a person who can both build and deploy what they create.

Consider whether you are a team that will support both R and Python or just one.

The art of writing analytics job descriptions #

Hiring, like sales and marketing, is all about the funnel; you are selling candidates on the opportunity of joining your team.

Very strong job descriptions are a crucial first step. I recommend job descriptions have five parts:

• Background on the role;
• Requirements;
• Responsibilities;
• Hiring process; and
• A 30/60/90 day plan (How You’ll Ramp).

Many job descriptions don’t have these things, but candidates really appreciate them.

For data roles, it’s a job seeker’s market. Investing in thorough job descriptions will help you stand out from the crowd and help ensure a strong candidate pipeline.

Overview and Background

Give the candidate an opportunity to understand the company, your goals for this role, and how they will fit into the team.

What does the team already have and what is the need that you are filling?

Is this someone who’s going to focus on a specific domain or subject area? Let them know up front.

This is also a great time to paint a picture of your stack and sell the candidate on your business.

Requirements

What are the hard requirements for your role? (Hint: a college degree shouldn’t be one.)

Do you need someone with experience with certain technologies or frameworks?

Your requirements list should be as specific as needed but should not be a laundry list.

For example, if you use Airflow, you don’t need to have Airflow experience as a requirement, but you might decide that orchestrator experience needs to be, so a candidate who has used Luigi, Prefect, or Dagster is also one you’d consider. If that’s the case, call out “Experience with data orchestration tools” instead of “Experience with Airflow.”

Try to keep your list of requirements to 5 to 10 bullet points. Fewer actual requirements is better than a lot of fungible requirements.

If you have additional “Nice to Haves,” make that a separate list. Women are less likely to apply for jobs if they feel they don’t meet all of the requirements. Help ensure a strong, diverse pipeline by keeping your list of requirements to only requirements.

Responsibilities

What are the things that a candidate will actually do if they move into this role?

Try to be as specific as possible. This is your opportunity to paint a picture for a candidate.

I always mention in interviews that we are looking for “floor sweepers” — people who are not afraid to pick up a broom and sweep a pile of dust on the floor if it’s in front of them, even though it’s not in their job description.

A list of responsibilities is not a list of all the things you will be doing, but this is your opportunity to present what an exciting role this will be.

Hiring Process

You should tell candidates upfront exactly what the steps in the interview process are.

Let me emphasize: You should tell candidates upfront exactly what the steps in the interview process are.

Nobody likes to be in the dark.

Tell candidates exactly how many calls they need to do, how long they will be, and who they will be with.

Is there a technical assessment? Include that information too.

If you cannot write this before posting a role, you have not spent enough time thinking through your hiring process.

How You’ll Ramp (30/60/90)

Starting a new job is nerve-wracking.

Laying out a 90-day plan on how candidates will ramp into a role helps establish standards for performance. It affirms to the candidate that you have thought about what success looks like and helps set their expectations.

As in data projects, the time to set clear measures of success is before you invest time and energy, not after.

Hiring is no joke, and is not a small amount of effort, but investing in the process up front is something that will pay long-term dividends.

Examples of analytics job descriptions #

Let’s take a look at example job descriptions for those four roles, to see how this breaks down in practice:

Data analyst job description

Job Overview

Included in all roles. This is specific to your company, your team, and your needs. This is your opportunity to sell yourself to the candidate.

Requirements

• Clear and direct communication skills about complex, technical topics
• Understanding of SaaS metrics
• Track record of working autonomously with organizational and time management skills

Responsibilities

• Utilize SQL + Git to build new analyses and support existing ones
• Communicate findings to a wide range of stakeholders
• Help drive a change in usage of data through active surfacing of insights to stakeholders

Hiring Process

1. Hiring Manager Resume Review
2. Recruiter Screen (1 hr)
3. Hiring Manager Interview (1 hr)
4. Technical Assessment (done on own time, asked to limit to 2 hours) + 30 min Technical Review with peer, scheduled upon submission
5. Peer Interview (1 hr)
6. Cross-functional interview, if supporting specific function
7. Executive Interview (30 mins to 1 hr)

How you’ll ramp

• 30 days: Working in our business intelligence tool, producing analyses on already modeled data
• 60 days: Helping lead metrics alignment conversations across stakeholders
• 90 days: Producing proactive insights for the business

Analytics engineer job description

Job Overview

Included in all roles. This is specific to your company, your team, and your needs. This is your opportunity to sell yourself to the candidate.

Requirements

• Comfortable working with Git and the command line
• Track record with Python/R and SQL to drive business insights
• Clear and direct communication skills about complex, technical topics

Responsibilities

• Expand our data warehouse with clean data ready for analysis
• Help to define and improve our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale data infrastructure

Hiring Process

1. Hiring Manager Resume Review
2. Recruiter Screen (1 hr)
3. Hiring Manager Interview (1 hr)
4. Technical Assessment (done on own time, asked to limit to 4 hours) + 1 min Technical Review with peer, scheduled upon submission
5. Peer Interview (1 hr)
6. Cross-functional interview, if supporting specific function
7. Executive Interview (30 mins to 1 hr)

How you’ll ramp

• 30 days: Comfortable working with dbt and our data stack from the command line
• 60 days: In the on-call rotation without named support
• 90 days: Gathering requirements and scope on projects with little support from more senior members of the team

Data engineer job description

Job Overview

Included in all roles. This is specific to your company, your team, and your needs. This is your opportunity to sell yourself to the candidate.

Requirements

• Experience creating production-grade ELT pipelines in Python
• Hands-on experience with data orchestrators (we use Airflow)
• Excellent written communicator who will enable async work

Responsibilities

• Evolve our CI/CD strategy on the data team’s code base
• Guide and implement architectural improvements to our data infrastructure
• Maintain our Airflow infrastructure and ensure efficiency in our orchestration processes

Hiring Process

1. Hiring Manager Resume Review
2. Recruiter Screen (1 hr)
3. Hiring Manager Interview (1 hr)
4. Technical Assessment (done on own time, asked to limit to 4 hours) + 1 min 5. Technical Review with peer, scheduled upon submission
5. Peer Interview (1 hr)
6. Executive Interview (30 mins to 1 hr)

How you’ll ramp

• 30 days: Be in the on-call rotation with named support
• 60 days: Be contributing to internal conversations on data organization and structure
• 90 days: Rolled out your first pipeline to support your team members with a new data source

Machine Learning Engineer Job Description

Job Overview

Included in all roles. This is specific to your company, your team, and your needs. This is your opportunity to sell yourself to the candidate.

Requirements

• Experience with supervised and unsupervised ML and deep learning frameworks like Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch
• Strong understanding of data and analytics, including experience with Big Data, real time and batch data processing is preferred.

Responsibilities

• End to end ownership of the engineering cycle, including deployment, for ML-based initiatives
• Work directly with development teams to guide how features get built from ideation to production

Hiring Process

1. Hiring Manager Resume Review
2. Recruiter Screen (1 hr)
3. Hiring Manager Interview (1 hr)
4. Technical Assessment (done on own time, asked to limit to 6 hours) + 1 min Technical Review with peer, scheduled upon submission
5. Peer Interview (1 hr)
6. Executive Interview (30 mins to 1 hr)

How you’ll ramp

• 30 days: Comfortable deploying data that can be used by developers for feature engineering
• 60 days: Helping guide workflows that move ML models from idea to production
• 90 days: Have a model you worked on be driving a feature that’s now in production

Special thanks Emilie for sharing her experience! You find Emilie on Twitter or her personal blog.

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