Example Job Description
Data Integration Specialist
A technical specialist who designs, builds, tests, monitors, and documents secure data movement among district systems while preserving meaning, quality, and recoverability.
Interview Planning Resource
Possible Interview Q&A: Data Integration Specialist
How to use this resource: Select questions that measure competencies established through the district’s current job analysis. Ask candidates the same predetermined questions under comparable conditions and evaluate responses against the same job-related criteria.
The indicators below describe evidence a strong response may contain; they are not required scripts or the only acceptable answers.
- How would you establish priorities and a practical annual work plan for APIs, secure files, event flows, ETL/ELT pipelines, integration platforms, databases, queues, schedulers, and monitoring?
Strong response indicators: Connects district goals and user needs to risk, dependencies, capacity, owners, milestones, service measures, communication, and review rather than producing an unranked project list.
- Describe a time you found that a familiar process or report was producing unreliable results. How did you investigate and correct it?
Strong response indicators: Defines the expected result, traces evidence to authoritative sources, distinguishes symptoms from root causes, involves accountable owners, tests the correction, reconciles downstream effects, documents decisions, and monitors recurrence.
- You encounter a production integration silently omitting or misrouting records. What would you do first, and how would you manage the issue through resolution?
Strong response indicators: Protects people and continuity, establishes scope and authority, preserves evidence, engages the right owners, communicates proportionately, documents decisions, verifies recovery or correction, and completes a lessons-learned review.
- How would you work with system owners, data stewards, application teams, vendors, security, privacy, analysts, schools, and program departments when they disagree about priorities or the acceptable level of risk?
Strong response indicators: Clarifies decision rights and shared purpose, surfaces evidence and constraints, distinguishes requirements from preferences, documents options and residual risk, facilitates a timely decision, and escalates through established authority when needed.
- What controls would you put in place before making a significant change to APIs, secure files, event flows, ETL/ELT pipelines, integration platforms, databases, queues, schedulers, and monitoring?
Strong response indicators: Includes requirements, ownership, risk and privacy review, representative testing, accessibility where relevant, approvals, change communication, rollback or contingency, validation, monitoring, documentation, and support readiness.
- How would you decide what to automate and what should retain meaningful human review?
Strong response indicators: Selects stable, repeatable, testable work for automation; preserves human authority for exceptions and consequential judgments; addresses access, logging, bias or error, monitoring, failure recovery, documentation, and periodic reassessment.
- How would you explain a serious technical, instructional, operational, or data concern to a leader who does not work in your specialty?
Strong response indicators: States the affected people and services, evidence, uncertainty, consequence, deadline, accountable owners, options, recommendation, residual risk, and next update in plain language.
- What would you do when a request exceeds source-system ownership, business definitions, access approval, infrastructure administration, vendor responsibility, and production change authority?
Strong response indicators: Recognizes the limit, avoids unauthorized action, clarifies the legitimate need, preserves service where possible, routes the decision to the authorized owner, documents the handoff, and follows through without abandoning the requester.
- How would you protect confidential information while still providing useful service and appropriate access?
Strong response indicators: Applies purpose limitation, minimum necessary access, role-based permissions, secure transmission and storage, approved retention, understandable communication, auditability, timely removal, and incident escalation.
- How would you build staff capability so your office does not become the permanent fixer of every problem?
Strong response indicators: Uses clear ownership, role-based training, usable procedures, coaching, feedback loops, office hours, communities of practice, quality reports, cross-training, and measures whether source practices improve.
- What evidence would you use to determine whether your work is improving completeness, accuracy, timeliness, latency, failure detection, recovery, reconciliation, security, maintainability, and support burden?
Strong response indicators: Uses a balanced set of outcome, implementation, service, risk, equity, and user-experience measures; disaggregates appropriately; explains limitations; establishes baselines and review cadence; and changes course when evidence warrants.
- What would you prioritize during your first 90 days?
Strong response indicators: Would inventory critical integrations and owners, identify fragile or undocumented flows, review failures and reconciliation evidence, confirm access and deployment practices, and stabilize a small number of high-risk pipelines; listens before redesigning, identifies urgent risks, delivers credible early improvements, and creates an achievable longer-term roadmap with owners and measures.
Position Description
Under the direction of the appropriate district administrator, the Data Integration Specialist develops and supports reliable, secure, standards-aware integrations, data pipelines, APIs, files, transformations, and reconciliation controls across district systems.
The position connects policy, people, process, information, and technology; establishes repeatable practices; makes unresolved risk visible; and supports continuous improvement without displacing the authority of designated program, legal, privacy, security, fiscal, instructional, or executive decision-makers.
Reports To
Illustrative reporting relationship: Data, information systems, applications, or technology manager. Insert the school district’s approved reporting relationship here.
Required Education and Credentials
Required
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, data engineering, software engineering, or a related field; equivalent qualifying experience may be accepted by local policy.
- No specific credential is universally required; relevant cloud, database, integration, programming, security, or data-engineering certification is preferred.
- Successful completion of all district-required employment clearances and assigned privacy, security, accessibility, records, and safety training.
Preferred
- Graduate study, advanced coursework, or current professional learning directly related to the position’s assigned scope.
- Relevant training in project management, facilitation, change management, data-informed improvement, and public-sector service.
Required / Desired Experience
Required Experience
- Experience developing and supporting data integrations using SQL, APIs, secure files, scripting, ETL/ELT, scheduling, logging, testing, and source control.
- Experience coordinating deadline-driven work with multiple departments, users, or school sites.
- Experience handling confidential information and documenting decisions, exceptions, and completed work.
Desired Experience
- K–12 experience with SIS, HR, finance, assessment, special education, LMS, rostering, identity, CEDS, Ed-Fi, SIF, OneRoster, or comparable standards and platforms.
- Experience developing procedures, training users, improving processes, and supporting continuity during staff or system changes.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
Integration Design and Development
- Analyze requirements, source and target schemas, identifiers, effective dates, dependencies, volumes, timing, and security constraints.
- Develop APIs, pipelines, files, events, mappings, transformations, schedules, validation, and exception handling using approved tools.
- Use standards and reusable patterns where appropriate; document assumptions, limitations, ownership, and data lineage.
Testing, Deployment, and Change
- Create unit, integration, regression, volume, negative, security, reconciliation, and recovery tests.
- Coordinate controlled deployment, configuration, credentials, release communication, rollback, and postimplementation validation.
- Assess vendor releases, schema changes, calendar rollover, and upstream or downstream changes before production impact.
Monitoring, Reconciliation, and Support
- Monitor schedules, logs, counts, latency, rejects, duplicates, missing records, alerts, and service dependencies.
- Reconcile source, in-transit, and destination populations; correct authorized transformations and coordinate source-data remediation.
- Respond to incidents, preserve evidence, restore processing, replay safely, communicate impact, and document root cause.
Security, Documentation, and Improvement
- Apply least privilege, secure secrets, encryption, approved environments, code review, source control, and audit-ready change records.
- Maintain interface specifications, runbooks, ownership, support contacts, data dictionaries, diagrams, known issues, and continuity materials.
- Reduce manual and fragile exchanges through prioritized improvement; perform other related duties consistent with classification.
Required Skills and Abilities
Knowledge of
- Data integration patterns, APIs, REST, secure file transfer, ETL/ELT, event messaging, scheduling, transformation, schema evolution, and error handling
- SQL and one or more scripting or programming languages such as Python, PowerShell, JavaScript, Java, C#, or comparable tools
- Relational data, identifiers, effective dating, referential integrity, metadata, lineage, quality, reconciliation, and observability
- Authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets, privacy, secure development, source control, testing, deployment, and recovery
Ability to
- Translate business rules and specifications into maintainable mappings, transformations, interfaces, and tests
- Trace records end to end and distinguish source, transformation, timing, transport, configuration, and destination defects
- Design idempotent processing, retry, exception, alerting, replay, and reconciliation controls
- Protect confidential information and minimize data movement, exposure, retention, and privileges
- Coordinate changes across owners and vendors with documented test, approval, deployment, rollback, and validation
- Explain integration dependencies and failures clearly to technical and program audiences
Work Environment
- Work is performed primarily in district offices, schools, meeting rooms, training environments, and other computer-based professional settings, with remote participation as authorized.
- The position requires extended computer use and detailed review of records, systems, reports, procedures, communications, or technical documentation.
- Work involves frequent coordination with system owners, data stewards, application teams, vendors, security, privacy, analysts, schools, and program departments.
- The employee may encounter competing priorities, interruptions, confidential matters, fixed deadlines, and time-sensitive problems requiring calm, documented judgment.
- Workload may increase during school opening and closing, reporting cycles, audits, major changes, incidents, and other critical district operations.
Other Requirements
- Successfully complete required criminal-record, fingerprint, and employment clearances.
- Complete a tuberculosis risk assessment and any examination required by applicable law or district policy.
- Complete district-required cybersecurity, privacy, accessibility, nondiscrimination, workplace-safety, and records-management training.
- Maintain professional confidentiality and comply with district policies governing records, information security, acceptable technology use, conflicts of interest, and data access.
- Travel between district offices, schools, meetings, training locations, and professional-development activities as assigned.
- Possess a valid California driver’s license and maintain insurability when driving is an essential function of the position.
- Occasionally work evening, weekend, or extended hours during critical operations, incidents, deadlines, public meetings, or system transitions.
- Regularly sit, stand, walk, speak, hear, read, and operate computers and standard office equipment; occasionally lift, carry, or move records, equipment, or supplies weighing up to 25 pounds.
- Perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation.