Senior Policy Data Analyst

Recidiviz; New York, Oakland (NY, CA); Hybrid; USD 108,000 - 132,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

PTO 20 days

Volunteer time

13 paid holidays

Parental leave 12 weeks

401(k) with 5% match

One Medical membership

Fertility and family benefits

ClassPass

Talkspace

Office in Oakland and Manhattan + any-

Annual offsite

Job summary

Recidiviz is hiring a Senior Policy Data Analyst to join our team. You will own end-to-end analyses of criminal justice data from state partners, translating policy questions into actionable insights. The role emphasizes independent work, collaboration with a Partnerships Lead, and presenting findings to DOC leadership.

Required: 5+ years of professional experience, proficiency in SQL and Python, and strong statistical thinking. Travel approximately every 6 months to state partners is expected.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of practical experience exploring, analyzing, and processing complex datasets.
• Professional experience using SQL with large datasets.
• Professional experience with Python, particularly pandas, for statistical analysis and data visualization.
• Sufficient statistical background to reason about analysis design, examine results closely, and prepare analyses that hold up to scrutiny.
• Experience scoping and delivering analytical work — particularly balancing depth and speed when navigating short timelines and shifting priorities.
• Experience on teams where ownership is shared across functions, including proactively seeking context you're missing and flagging risks before they become blockers.

Responsibilities

• Building analysis from corrections and parole data. You'll use SQL and Python to wrangle administrative data to articulate how a system behaves.
• Modeling policy scenarios and quantifying tradeoffs. Apply statistical methods to project outcomes under different policy designs.
• Communicating findings to the people making the decision. Create decks/memos for DOC leadership and tailor to the audience.
• Running your projects end to end. Translate objectives into an analysis strategy and manage roadmaps.
• Collaborating across Recidiviz. Gather state context and understand data infrastructure to support policy implementation.
• Finding the next opportunity. Identify new analytical angles to unlock decisions.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data analysis

Statistics

Policy experience

Communication

Tools

BigQuery

Looker

Jupyter

Python/Pandas

Job description

Location: Remote, New York City, or Oakland

• Travel is encouraged approximately once every 6 months to state partners within the continental USA, and occasionally required. We expect these trips to include visits to prisons and parole offices.

Role Type: Full-time

Compensation: $120,000

Hires remotely in: United States

Experience: 5+ years of full-time, professional work experience

Recidiviz is thrilled to be hiring a Senior Policy Data Analyst to join our team! We’re a small, fast-moving group that works with complex criminal justice data from our state partners and develops analyses and tools that target the drivers of incarceration. That’s where you come in. We’re looking for someone who has creativity and inquisitiveness to identify and solve open-ended problems, clarity to think through complex and variable data, flexibility to adjust in a rapidly evolving environment, and above all else, a collaborative, kind nature to add to our culture.

About us

Recidiviz is creating safer, healthier communities by improving outcomes for people in the criminal justice system. We build technology to reduce the number of people in prison and to help criminal justice leaders embrace data-driven decision-making.

Using software tools and thoughtful product design, we’ve been able to safely and permanently reduce incarceration and improve outcomes. 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. In addition to the revenue we earn from state partners, some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations support our work.

People who succeed at Recidiviz lead with kindness and humility, assume good intent, learn from failure, and fix problems when they see them. They are excited to work arm in arm with government leadership and staff to improve outcomes. They are great listeners. They build deep relationships with and empathy for the people we work with and the people who our mission serves, even when those two groups feel at odds.

About the role

Recidiviz's policy team works with state DOC leaders who want to rewrite old policies or write new ones, grounded in evidence and analytics, to improve outcomes. We use administrative datasets to generate context-responsive insights that expand momentum for policy change. We answer questions like:

• What earned sentence credit structure creates the strongest reward system given the distribution of sentence lengths and program availability?
• How do the factors that drive parole board decisions align with the factors most quantitatively predictive of post-release outcomes? How would outcomes change if dynamic factors were weighted more heavily?
• How will a new supervision contact standard affect the alignment between supervision officer bandwidth and high-need clients?

By translating policy concepts into concrete modeling, we help states make smarter and more ambitious changes.

Senior Policy Data Analysts are high-autonomy technical contributors. They own an end to end analytic process — breaking project objectives into analytical products, designing the approach, derisking the timeline, producing the findings, and preparing the materials that go in front of decision-makers. The core skill is decision-support: building analysis for a decision rather than for a research finding.

This role is as much about making judgment calls as it is about running analytical work. Most of our projects are first of their kind, which requires designing the approach as you go. Projects change mid-flight as our understanding of system dynamics develops and the needs of stakeholders shift. This role works closely with a Partnerships Lead, who coordinates with state partners to determine project objectives. The Senior Policy Data Analyst sets the analysis strategy to meet those objectives. Success is measured by the impact your interventions drive.

Core responsibilities

• Building analysis from corrections and parole data. You'll use SQL and Python to wrangle administrative data to articulate how a system behaves. You ramp up on new data quickly, going deep where it changes the answer and making defensible simplifying assumptions where it doesn’t.
• Modeling policy scenarios and quantifying tradeoffs. Apply statistical methods like regressions, time series, stock-and-flow modeling or distributional analysis to project how outcomes change under different policy designs, and assess what the data can and can't support. A core judgment is developing simple and elegant approaches that cut to the heart of the decision point.
• Communicating findings to the people making the decision. You work backward from what information a stakeholder needs to advance decision-making in the room. You'll create the decks and memos that go to DOC leadership, find the frameworks that make a complicated tradeoff digestible, and take responsibility for tailoring your work to the audience to motivate action.
• Running your projects end to end. You'll translate project objectives into an analysis strategy, set project roadmaps, and identify and address unknowns. You’ll adjust course as project objectives change, and rightsize analysis with impact.
• Collaborating across Recidiviz. You'll collaborate across the organization to obtain state context, understand underlying data infrastructure, and support policy implementation.
• Finding the next opportunity. You’ll go deeper on the states you work in — spotting where additional analysis could unlock a decision, and running the early exploration to assess whether it’s worth pursuing.

Wild success

A year from now:

• You’ve driven impact. Your work has directly shaped several policy reforms across the country.
• You’ve uncovered new opportunities. You spotted a new opportunity in your states that became new work for the team.
• You've made your projects more effective. The people around you have less scramble, clearer ownership, and smoother handoffs, making it easier for everyone to focus on driving towards impact.
• You've leveled up our analytical team. Approaches you designed, like a modeling pattern or a framework for a recurring question, are now being reused by teammates on other states.
• 5 or more years of practical experience exploring, analyzing, and processing complex datasets
• Professional experience using SQL with large datasets, including high proficiency writing efficient queries for complex extraction and transformation
• Professional experience with Python, particularly pandas, for statistical analysis and data visualization
• Sufficient statistical background to reason about analysis design, examine results closely, and prepare analyses that hold up to scrutiny
• Experience scoping and delivering analytical work — particularly balancing depth and speed when navigating short timelines and shifting priorities
• Experience on teams where ownership is shared across functions, including proactively seeking context you're missing and flagging risks before they become blockers.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience adapting quantitative methods to introduce intuitively meaningful metrics in ambiguous, unconstrained contexts
• Experience working with large administrative datasets from the public sector, especially related to criminal justice
• Familiarity with our data stack, which includes Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery, Looker, Jupyter notebooks, and Python/Pandas

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: $120,000.

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
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan with 5% company match and no vesting period
• Complimentary One Medical membership (depending 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 each spring 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 20 state partners – big and small, red and blue – and covers more than 46% of the US incarcerated population. We have helped to get tens of thousands of people out of the criminal justice system, safely and equitably, and saved states nearly $1 billion. In the next five years, Recidiviz plans to partner with 40 states and help 250,000 people who are stuck in the system to get out and stay out. 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.

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, and we'll take a look – you might be great for another role or another time!

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Recidiviz’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

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An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.