Data Engineer - Materials Discovery Research Institute at Lucas James Talent Partners
Skokie, IL
$100,000
Aug 6, 2026
Skokie, IL
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A data engineering role at a nonprofit research institute focused on materials science, responsible for designing and operating data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, and data platforms that support analytics and machine learning research. The engineer will integrate data from laboratory systems, databases, and external APIs into unified datasets, contribute to data governance and architecture decisions, and selectively assist with exploratory analysis, feature engineering, and ML model development alongside data scientists and researchers.
Mid level · 4+ years · Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 150 people in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 110–190
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $110,007 (middle half $86,460–$141,249).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 8, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (4)
The role is a genuine hybrid between data engineering (primary) and applied data science (secondary). SOC 15-1243 (Database Architects) was chosen because the core work is building and evolving data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, and data platforms; 15-2051 (Data Scientists) is a meaningful runner-up given the ML model development and feature engineering responsibilities.
The degree requirement states 'Bachelor's degree … or equivalent combination of education and experience,' so no hard degree gate is set.
The skills list appears under a 'What makes you a great fit' section framed with 'no one candidate will embody every quality … will bring many of the following.' However, SQL, Python, and the ML libraries are stated with 'strong proficiency' and 'experience with' language that reads as firm gates; the cloud platform requirement similarly uses 'experience with … such as' (substitution qualifier), so Azure/AWS/GCP are marked required with alternatives. Infrastructure-as-code/containerization (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes) and orchestration/distributed processing tools (Spark, Databricks, Data Factory) are introduced with 'familiarity with,' which is softer language, so they are marked preferred.
No compensation figures are stated in the posting.
Read the full posting
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