Data Engineer

About FRI

Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) is a nonprofit research organization that advances the science of forecasting to improve decision-making on high-stakes issues. Building on the work of Chief Scientist Philip Tetlock, we develop practical forecasting tools and apply them to society’s most critical decisions, including in the fields of AI progress, nuclear risk, and biosecurity.

Our core team of about 20 runs dozens of active research projects, collecting and analyzing forecasts from domain experts, top forecasters, the public, and AI systems. We maintain ForecastBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI forecasting capabilities.

To learn more about our work, see the reports on our website and in articles in The Economist, TIME, and Vox.

The role

FRI is building out its data infrastructure to support a growing portfolio of research projects. We have dozens of active projects, each generating forecasting data from surveys, expert panels, and AI systems. We are looking for a Data Engineer to own and develop FRI’s data platform—from ingesting raw survey data to delivering clean, reliable datasets that power our research.

You would be FRI’s first dedicated data engineer, working initially alongside an external vendor to onboard and extend an existing data warehouse, and eventually taking full ownership of our data infrastructure. This is a foundational role with significant autonomy: you will make key architectural decisions, choose tooling, and shape how FRI manages, transforms, and serves data across the organization.

Core responsibilities include:

  • Managing data quality, access controls, and documentation so that a team of about 10 analysts can reliably query and use the data

  • Supporting infrastructure for LLM-based research (e.g., serving data for AI forecasting benchmarks like ForecastBench)

  • Building and maintaining data pipelines that ingest data from multiple sources (survey platforms, metadata stores, external datasets) into a cloud data warehouse

  • Designing and evolving a dimensional data model (staging, dimension, fact, and mart layers) that standardizes forecasting data across FRI’s projects

  • Setting up orchestration, monitoring, and alerting for production data pipelines

Qualifications

Successful candidates will have the following characteristics:

  • Passionate about FRI’s mission of improving decision-making on high-stakes issues

  • Strong Python skills and experience building data pipelines (ETL/ELT)

  • Proficient in SQL and dimensional data modeling (star schema, staging/dimension/fact layers)

  • Experience with cloud data warehouses (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift)

  • Clear, explicit communicator, both in writing and verbally

  • Ability to work productively in a self-directed (remote) environment

The ideal candidate would have the following characteristics:

  • Familiarity with modern data stack tools (e.g., dbt, Airflow, Dagster) or similar transformation and orchestration frameworks

  • Experience with version control, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code practices (e.g., Git, Docker, Terraform)

  • Prior software engineering experience (e.g., backend development, web development, or maintaining production systems)

  • Comfortable deploying and operating services on a major cloud platform (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure)

  • Interest in quantitative forecasting (including ML/AI)

We highly encourage you to apply, even if you don't feel completely qualified. Some of the best people we’ve worked with in our careers felt underqualified when they first applied, and we’re glad they did so anyway.

Submit Application

The fine print

Role details

  • We prefer full-time but are open to part-time roles for the right candidate.

  • This role is entirely remote, however we ensure that team members have opportunities to connect and collaborate in-person with regular team retreats (currently three times per year) and virtual collaboration sessions. We are able to hire people in most countries, provided they have pre-existing work authorization for that country. Applicants can work whichever hours of the day work for them but must be consistently available between our core hours of 11am and 3pm ET.

  • We may be able to sponsor US work visas, however we cannot guarantee that a visa application will be successful.

  • Salary is commensurate with experience, $75,000–$130,000.

  • We provide 80% contribution towards fully funded health insurance for staff, 30 days per year of paid time off (including holidays), and up to 10 days of paid sick leave, among other benefits.

Application process

We are actively reviewing applications on a rolling basis and will take down this job posting when the role is filled.

The application process will vary by candidate but for successful candidates will typically involve:

  • An initial application, including a 1-hour work test

  • A paid 10-hour work test

  • Three to four virtual interviews with members of our team