The Rockies are hiring a data engineer, and it could be you

Every now and again the Rockies ask us to pass along a job advertisement. That’s what this post is about. But before we get to the specific job and take a marvel at how dang cool it would be to have a Coors Field office and have access to inside knowledge about front office operations and decision making, it’s worth recalling that every time we’ve posted a job ad for the Rockies, it’s been for the team’s growing research and development team. This gives us a glimpse in to where the Rockies are providing resources and what they think will help the team win.

In short, the Rockies are investing in data analysis and analytics as a way to keep the team competitive. Don’t believe anyone who tells you the Rockies don’t care about baseball analytics. More often than not, that just means the person talking either doesn’t care about them or doesn’t care to engage with them.

Still, that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing the Rockies care about. Don’t believe anyone who tells you relationships within a baseball organization don’t matter, because that just might betray hesitance to acknowledge the value of something that’s impossible to quantify.

For instance, the this most recent job advertisement, the following responsibilities appear back-to-back:

• Perform quantitative research related to baseball strategy and player evaluation
• Collaborate with coaches, scouts and baseball operations to suggest process improvements

In other words, the Rockies want a data nerd who can suss out player value from a spreadsheet while also relating to and collaborating with field staff. This is modern baseball.

Here’s the job summary (and click here for the full description and instructions on how to apply):

We are looking for a Data Engineer to join our Research and Development team. The successful candidate will be responsible for expanding and optimizing our data warehouse and data pipeline architecture, with a focus on collecting, cleaning, transforming, managing and validating data using distributed computing and storage systems. The goal of the Data Engineer is to democratize data, support data initiatives, ensure consistent data delivery and empower Rockies personnel to derive powerful and actionable insights.

Tell ‘em Purple Row sent you.