Senior Policy Data Analyst

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

Visa sponsorship: Not available

Hires remotely in: United States

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

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.

Minimum qualifications

• 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