Volunteer Data Analyst (Web-Scraping)

Description

Join our team to help us build, maintain, and automate web-scraping data workflows. As a Volunteer Data Analyst, you will develop scripts to gather, clean & format, and store information that directly supports our need for public education and economic data.

Technical Proficiency & Skills

We are looking for individuals who are interested and preferably skilled in the mechanics of web data scraping and are eager to apply their coding skills to real-world datasets.

• Python Proficiency: Good fundamental knowledge of Python. You should be comfortable writing clear, functional, and organized code.
• Web Scraping & Automation: Ability to, or willingness to learn, how to navigate, extract, and structure data from web environments.
  • Tools & Packages: Ability to, or willingness to learn tools and packages including HTTP Requests, BeautifulSoup, or web-scraping automation tools like Playwright, Selenium, Scrapy, or Crawlee.
• Data Storage: Ability to, or willingness to learn, how to work with relational databases. You will be responsible for inserting data into a relational DB (e.g. DuckDB or SQLite).
• SQL Competency: Ability to, or willingness to learn, how to write standard SQL queries for data retrieval, validation, and basic transformation.

Core Expectations

• Data Integrity: Ensure that the data being scraped is accurate, well-structured, and reliable for organizational use.
• Workflow Documentation: Create clear documentation for your scripts so that other team members can successfully run or update them as websites change.
• Communication: Provide regular, brief updates on progress and flag any technical hurdles early. We value proactive communication to keep projects moving forward.

What You Will Gain

• Project Development: The opportunity to design and manage end-to-end data pipelines in Python, from initial ingestion to structured database storage.
• Skill Development: Gain practical experience in the full data project lifecycle, providing a great foundation for future professional roles in data engineering or analysis.