Data Engineer, Baseball Systems

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Our Vision

To become baseball’s highest performing organization — defined by our relentless pursuit of excellence, strengthened by our connection, and fueled by our positive energy.

Our Core Values

• Joy. We want to be around people that like to have fun. We remain optimistic through the ups and downs, we enjoy the process, and we share in something bigger than ourselves.
• Humility. We don’t have all the answers. We lead with curiosity, listen generously, and seek growth from every experience — especially the tough ones. We have gotten over ourselves.
• Integrity. We do the right thing, even when it’s hard. We act with honesty, accountability, and respect for our teammates and ourselves. We treat the custodian like the king.
• Competitiveness. We embrace challenges and thrive in high-stakes environments. We prepare relentlessly. We are energized by the idea of keeping score.

Position Summary

The Washington Nationals are seeking a software engineer focused on data engineering and infrastructure to join our Baseball Systems team. The data engineer will help ensure our datasets are well organized and accessible for our R&D analysts and other stakeholders in Baseball Operations. We are looking for candidates who are passionate about building impactful solutions around data workflows and enthusiastic about working in a baseball front office.

The Washington Nationals Baseball R&D group is responsible for deriving insights from our baseball datasets and building proprietary metrics and data products which are used to inform baseball decision making and processes throughout our organization. As a data engineer in the Baseball Systems group, you’ll have the opportunity to work with large, novel baseball datasets including video, pitch tracking, bat tracking, player tracking, biomechanical data, and performance data (i.e. from force plates, pressure mats, or wearable tech). These datasets present interesting engineering challenges given both the size of the datasets and the need to store the data in ways that are easy to access and use.

We prefer candidates who are willing to relocate to Washington, DC area for in person work at Nationals Park, but we are willing to consider a fully remote option for exceptional candidates.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Build robust data pipelines and ETL processes that pull data from a variety of sources (HTTP APIs, cloud object stores like AWS S3, relational databases) and write to our internal data systems
• Assist with the deployment, orchestration, and monitoring of our data pipelines and machine learning pipelines. We use Prefect for orchestration, utilizing AWS Fargate on ECS
• Design and build solutions to make working with our internal datasets easier. This work includes maintaining database tables and views, building out our Apache Iceberg data lakehouse, merging datasets from different sources into consistent formats, and building internal APIs to make data more accessible
• Develop validation processes to monitor data quality and flag potential sources of error
• Assist with the maintenance of our cloud computing infrastructure: manage and configure servers, databases, and other systems
• Research and advocate for any new tooling that can aide in timely, accurate and accessible data delivery

Requirements:

Minimum Education and Experience Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, information science, or a related field
• 4+ years of relevant work experience

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities necessary to perform essential functions

• Fluency in Python and SQL
• Experience with orchestration tools (e.g Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, etc.)
• Proficient with MySQL, PostgreSQL, DuckDB, or other relational database systems
• Experience with AWS or other cloud providers
• Some experience with Terraform and/or Ansible is a plus
• Comfortable working on the command line in a Linux environment
• Ability to work independently with close attention to detail
• Enthusiastic about working in baseball
• Authorized to work in the United States

Physical/Environmental Requirements

• Office: Working conditions are normal for an office environment. Work may require occasional weekend and/or evening work

Our Technical Stack

• Languages: Python, SQL, R (Analytics/ML)
• Orchestration & Compute: Prefect, AWS ECS (Fargate), AWS Batch
• Storage & Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS S3
• Modern Data Architecture: Apache Iceberg, Trino, DuckDB
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Terraform, Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Ubuntu Linux

Compensation:

The projected annual salary range for this position is $130,000 - $150,000 per year. Actual pay is based on several factors, including but not limited to the applicant’s: qualifications, skills, expertise, education/training, certifications, and other organization requirements. Starting salaries for new employees are frequently not at the top of the applicable salary range.

Benefits:

The Nationals offer a competitive and comprehensive benefits package that presently includes:

• Medical, dental, vision, life and AD&D insurance
• Short- and long-term disability insurance
• Flexible spending accounts
• 401(k) and pension plan
• Access to complimentary tickets to Nationals home games
• Employee discounts
• Free onsite fitness center

Equal Opportunity Employer:

The Nationals are dedicated to offering equal employment and advancement opportunities to all individuals regardless of their race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, genetic information, disability, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.

Equal Opportunity Employer

This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.