Software Engineer II

Job description

Civitech is a public benefit corporation dedicated to creating a fairer and more equitable democracy by building the tools and infrastructure needed to increase civic participation, empower Democratic candidates to win, and support the success of progressive causes. Since its founding in 2019, over 500 partners—a range of nonprofit organizations, national political committees, and individual campaigns—have utilized Civitech’s tools to reach tens of millions of voters to help create a more equitable and progressive democracy.

This hire will join our Core Engineering Team and be responsible for building and maintaining products that empower progressive candidates, organizations, and constituents all over America. Civitech is a remote-first company hiring within our current footprint of 27 states (AL, AK, CA, CO, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IL, MA, MD, MN, NC, ND, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, SD, TN, TX, VA, WA, WI, WY); Civitech does have an office in Austin, TX.

It is important that our team reflects the diversity of the organizations we seek to serve. We strongly encourage women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and others otherwise underrepresented in the technology sector to apply.

Civitech’s Values:

• We act with Integrity – At Civitech, we hold ourselves to the highest standards and value open and transparent communications with all of our stakeholders. Our rigorous approach to product design, testing, and data science leads to accurate assessments of our outcomes and challenges us to constantly improve our tools.
• We are Changemakers – As a team, Civitech seeks to make transformational change in our democracy by eliminating obstacles meant to hamper contribution from every member of the community.
• We are Collaborators - Buoyed by our mission, we look for opportunities to partner with everyone committed to making democracy easier to participate in. We seek to understand the challenges our partners face and use our skills and creativity to help them solve them.
• We are Bold – We recognize that disruptive change won’t come with doing business as usual. Civitech seeks to revolutionize civic participation by bringing innovation and creativity to politics.

Why Work at Civitech:

• Medical, Vision, & Dental Insurance
• 401(k) plan
• Employee Stock Options
• Employer-paid Life Insurance
• Short/Long Term Disability Insurance
• Flexible Time Off & Paid Company Holidays
• Flexible Spending Account
• Parental Leave
• Flexible Schedules
• Professional Development Stipend
• Monthly Office Upkeep Stipend

What you will do:

• Participate with other engineers in the design, implementation, and maintenance of Civitech’s applications and infrastructure.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, research, and data science teams to develop features from participation in requirements definition through to testing and documentation.
• Build scalable, secure, and high-performing features in a cloud environment.
• Communicate effectively with team members and contribute to an open and inclusive engineering culture.
• Grow your technical skills and contribute to effective team development practices.

If you were here today, you’d be:

• Building Voter Registration Pipelines: Implementing National Change of Address lookups and working with the Data Science team to generate more targets for our Voter Registration Mail programs so we can effectively register more Democrats.
• Optimizing Data Availability: Developing new features to automatically make election research data available in our customer facing tools, reducing latency to our end users.
• Bridging Data Silos: Designing strategies to effectively and broadly share data between various operational PostgreSQL databases and BigQuery data warehouses to enrich existing datasets.

About you:

• You have 4 - 8 years of software engineering experience.
• You thrive in a fast-paced startup environment, enjoy building software for the public good, and are passionate about democracy, civics, and politics.
• You have expertise with one or more of the following: Ruby on Rails, Python, or Javascript/Typescript.
• You have experience working with cloud environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform or AWS; experience with Azure is also valuable.
• You are skilled in facilitating collaboration between engineers and with partner teams.
• You are experienced with identifying issues and helping to develop solutions.
• You are used to being actively engaged in planning the team’s work via backlog refinement, helping to write user stories.
• You are practiced with written and verbal communication that helps make complex code accessible.
• You prioritize writing maintainable and well-documented code.
• You demonstrate the ability to effectively give and receive constructive feedback, especially with other engineers.
• You are autonomous in your engineering work and know when to seek support.
• You’re a strong pairing partner for other engineers and are comfortable mentoring other engineers regularly to help them grow their skills.
• You’re accustomed to taking the lead role on projects and/or in cross-functional teams.
• You think beyond functional requirements of a project/feature and ensure non-functional requirements - like performance and documentation - are accounted for, ensuring that engineering needs of latter phases like QA, deployment, and launch have been considered.

Additional qualifications (need some but not all): Our current work benefits from the below. Please keep in mind that you do not need to bring expertise in all of these to be the right candidate for this role.

• Domain Knowledge:
• Understanding of U.S. elections administration and/or campaign operations.
• Engineering Expertise
• Knowledge of building and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications, including performing upgrades, using GraphQL-Ruby, Turbo/Stimulus, Rspec, etc.
• Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript (used within and without Rails).
• Understanding of API design, development, and usage, especially GraphQL APIs.
• Proficiency in Python for scripting, automation, or data-related tasks.
• Experience contributing to automated test suites and ensuring robust coverage.
• Systems and Data
• Knowledge of scaling and high-availability techniques.
• Expertise in PostgreSQL (with PostGIS for geospatial data)
• Experience working with cloud data warehouses, particularly BigQuery.
• Knowledge of building scalable data pipelines with dbt.
• Infrastructure
• Experience maintaining infrastructure hosted on AWS or GCP.
• Experience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools, especially GitLab CI and/or GitHub Actions.
• Familiarity with Terraform for Infrastructure-as-Code
• Technical Leadership
• You are a product-minded engineer who is accustomed to thinking about how what they’re building serves end users.
• You have a track record of successfully mentoring other engineers.
• You actively contribute to team culture and agile methodologies to improve engineering processes.

$110,000 - $126,000 a year

Full-time, competitive salary range between $110,000 and $126,000 commensurate with experience, education, relevant skills, and other job-related qualifications.

The Engineering team builds scalable, secure, and user-friendly applications that empower progressive organizations, drive civic engagement, and promote democratic participation. We work closely with product and data teams to deliver impactful solutions.

This position is on our Core Engineering Team and reports to that team’s Engineering Manager. The team focuses on tools used by our research team to collect and maintain civic and constituent data, our GraphQL API product used both internally and externally, data export products that provide civic data to customers, and data engineering for our Voter Registration Mail product.

Our work spans backend-heavy data products and internal UI tools where reliability is critical. A core challenge lies in evolving our API and data export offerings, thoughtfully advancing functionality and the developer experience while maintaining stability across existing contracts.

Civitech is headquartered in Austin, TX, with employees in various states across the US. The Software Engineer can work from our Austin co-working space or remotely in any of the 27 states currently in Civitech’s footprint (AL, AK, CA, CO, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IL, MA, MD, MN, NC, ND, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, SD, TN, TX, VA, WA, WI, WY). All candidates must be eligible to work in the US on their own accord, without need for sponsorship, and live / work within one of our designated states above.

Civitech is not able to provide visa sponsorship at this time.

Civitech provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws.

Please be aware that Civitech utilizes E-Verify to verify an employee’s eligibility to work in the United States. This step occurs after an offer has been extended and accepted, and after the employee has completed their Form I-9. Please find more information about our participation in this program here.

No recruiters or agencies, please!