Data Engineer - Research and Development

The Pirates Why

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a storied franchise in Major League Baseball who are reinventing themselves on every level. Boldly and relentlessly pursuing excellence by:

• purposefully developing a player and people-centered culture;
• deeply connecting with our fans, partners, and colleagues;
• passionately creating lifetime memories for generations of families and friends; and
• meaningfully impacting our communities and the game of baseball.

At the Pirates, we believe in the power of a diverse workforce and strive to create an inclusive culture centered in Passion, Innovation, Respect, Accountability, Teamwork, Empathy, and Service.

Job Summary

We are seeking a talented and motivated Data Engineer to join our Research & Development team within Baseball Operations. In this role, you will play a critical part in designing, building, and maintaining the data infrastructure that powers the software and research models we use to make baseball decisions every day. The accessible, reliable, and efficient data-focused solutions you build will enable our analysts, coaches, and front office staff to make informed decisions that influence player acquisition, improvement, and deployment decisions. You will work with data from cutting-edge technologies, including markerless motion capture, biomechanical assessments, and real-time player tracking systems.

Responsibilities:

1. Build and maintain scalable data pipelines to support baseball operations.
2. Collect requirements from non-technical stakeholders and translate those into useable products
3. Collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and engineers for seamless data integration.
4. Manage and ensure data accuracy from diverse sources, including advanced technologies like markerless motion capture.
5. Containerize and productionize models produced by data scientists.
6. Own pipelines from initial ingestion through production support, including debugging, performance tuning, and stakeholder feedback.
7. Implement data quality checks, validation, monitoring, and alerting to ensure trust in downstream analysis and decision-making.
8. Support the migration of data infrastructure to cloud-based platforms.
9. Identify and implement improvements to data processing and storage.

Success Factors:

• You balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution, moving seamlessly between planning sessions and heads-down coding.
• You embrace the latest technologies to solve complex problems and you are always learning.
• You favor clean, simple solutions and document patterns so the whole team can move quickly.
• You thrive in collaborative, fast-paced environments.
• You embrace Agile or similar methodologies and know how to tailor process to fit the team’s needs.

Qualifications

Required:

1. Authorized to work lawfully in the United States.
2. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
3. Demonstrated proficiency in Python, SQL or Spark for ETL and analysis.
4. Demonstrated experience with cloud-based data platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and data warehousing technologies (e.g., Snowflake or Databricks Lakehouse).
5. Demonstrated familiarity with data pipeline orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Perfect, Dagster, dbt).
6. Demonstrated problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
7. Demonstrated strong data modeling skills (eg. normalization, indexing)
8. Demonstrated passion for baseball or other sports is a plus.
9. Demonstrated DevOps experience is a plus (eg. CI/CD implementation, containerization, infrastructure as code)

Desired:

1. Hands on experience in Statistical Learning or AI Development
2. Deep curiosity about baseball and how data, analytics, and technology inform strategy and performance.

Equal Opportunity Employer

 The Pittsburgh Pirates are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.