Technical Data Migration Specialist (Contract) - CatalogIt

Posted on 9/2/26

At CatalogIt, we design and deliver technology products that empower people to manage their collections and tell their stories. CatalogIt users include museums, corporate collections, brand archives, private collectors, appraisers, conservators, artists- anyone with a need to manage a collection.

Technical Data Migration Specialist - Contract

Independent Contractor | $60–$80/hour, depending on skill level | Approximately 20 hours/week | Remote

About the Role

CatalogIt is looking for a technically minded Data Migration Specialist, working in a contractual capacity, to help customers move their collections data from existing systems into CatalogIt.

This role sits at the intersection of data, programming, problem-solving, and customer service. You'll work directly with customer databases, spreadsheets, images, and other files to understand how their existing information is structured, transform that information into a format suitable for CatalogIt, perform the import, and verify that the resulting data is complete and accurate.

You'll also work directly with customers—helping them extract data from their existing systems, asking questions necessary to understand their data, reviewing completed migrations with them, and answering questions about the results.

This is not primarily a software development position, although you'll regularly write scripts and use programming tools to manipulate data. We're looking for someone who understands museum data and databases, is comfortable programming, and enjoys figuring out how unfamiliar systems and datasets fit together.

A computer science degree is not required. Technical aptitude, practical experience, curiosity, and the ability to solve problems are much more important to us.

What You'll Do

• Work directly with customer data from databases, spreadsheets, CSV files, JSON, and other sources.
• Extract data from systems such as Microsoft Access, FileMaker Pro, and other collections or database applications.
• Analyze unfamiliar databases and datasets to understand their structure, relationships, and meaning.
• Map customer data to the appropriate structures and fields within CatalogIt.
• Write TypeScript/JavaScript, SQL, and other scripts to clean, normalize, manipulate, and transform data.
• Import transformed data into CatalogIt.
• Migrate customer images, documents, and other media and ensure they are associated with the correct records.
• Perform QA on completed migrations, including validating record counts, field mappings, relationships, media, and representative records.
• Identify inconsistencies, missing information, duplicate records, malformed data, and other migration issues.
• Work directly with customers to understand their existing data and resolve questions or ambiguities.
• Meet with customers after migrations to review the results, explain how their information was mapped into CatalogIt, and answer questions.
• Use AI tools such as Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini to understand unfamiliar data, develop transformations, and work more efficiently.
• Document migration processes and create reusable tools and techniques for future migrations.

What We're Looking For

You should be comfortable working with data and technology, but you don't need to be a traditional software engineer.

A successful candidate will:

• Have experience with museum collections data
• Have a strong understanding of relational databases, tables, fields, keys, and relationships.
• Be comfortable writing and understanding SQL.
• Understand common data formats such as CSV, Excel, and JSON.
• Have programming or scripting experience. TypeScript/JavaScript experience is particularly useful, but experience with Python, Java, Go, or similar languages can also provide the necessary foundation.
• Be comfortable learning unfamiliar software and investigating unfamiliar databases.
• Have strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Be meticulous about data accuracy and willing to investigate discrepancies.
• Be able to work independently and take ownership of a migration from initial data extraction through final customer review.
• Communicate clearly and comfortably with customers, including customers who may not be technically oriented.
• Be organized and able to manage multiple migrations at different stages.
• Be intellectually curious and enjoy figuring out how things work.

Experience with Microsoft Access, FileMaker Pro, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Linux/command-line tools, or data migration projects is particularly valuable, but we don't expect candidates to know every technology on day one.

What Success Looks Like

A successful migration isn't simply one that completes without errors. The customer's information needs to arrive in CatalogIt accurately, completely, and in a form that makes sense to the customer.

You'll own that process—from understanding the source data through transformation, import, QA, and the final review with the customer.

About CatalogIt

At CatalogIt, we design and deliver technology that empowers people and organizations to manage their collections and tell their stories. Our users include museums, corporate and brand archives, private collectors, appraisers, conservators, artists, and others responsible for documenting and preserving collections.

CatalogIt is a remote company with its primary place of operation near Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We value technical curiosity, thoughtful problem-solving, personal accountability, strong communication, and people who continually look for better ways to work.

Interested candidates should submit questions and resumes to us at jobs@catalogit.app.