Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. ActBlue is a nonprofit technology organization building infrastructure for Democratic campaigns, progressive-aligned causes, and people-powered movements. The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for multi-quarter initiatives on the Extensibility and Integrations team, architecting scalable data solutions, APIs, and database systems while improving integrations, reporting, reliability, and maintainability. The role also involves cross-team collaboration, mentoring engineers, and advancing extensible tools for fundraising administrators.
Responsibilities
- Architect and lead database modernization efforts, optimizing large-scale systems for efficiency and reliability while safeguarding sensitive donor information through advanced data management and retention strategies
- Lead the design and implementation of scalable data solutions and robust APIs, ensuring seamless data integration, high availability, and alignment with business goals for peak performance during critical fundraising moments
- Lead the technical execution of large, cross-team initiatives, working with multiple engineers to design and implement solutions that balance high-impact opportunities with effort, scope, and technical tradeoffs
- Break down initiative-level work across multiple epics and contribute technical expertise to shape the team's roadmap prioritization
- Proactively tackle database performance, refining schemas and enhancing data retrieval processes while creating strategic integrations for vendor APIs for improved system interconnectivity
- Serve as a technical consultant and go-to resource for engineers across teams on complex architectural decisions, system design, and best practices — particularly around extensibility, integrations, and data exchange
- Advocate for comprehensive monitoring systems and software quality standards, implementing best practices that anticipate and accommodate future scalability and maintenance needs
- Recognize the importance of addressing tech debt head-on. Your proactive approach will ensure our systems remain agile and adaptable, setting us up for future success
- Demonstrate technical leadership through writing documentation, establishing effective testing and monitoring, and fostering clear and audience-oriented communication
- Coach and mentor engineers on your team, creating professional development opportunities and partnering with engineering managers to find sponsorship and growth opportunities for your colleagues
- Model effective feedback in code reviews, explaining the "why" in a way that's easily understood, and create spaces for individuals to be engaged, valued, and heard
Skills
- 6-8 years of relevant professional experience, with demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership for multi-quarter initiatives involving complex requirements, strategic thinking, and cross-team collaboration
- Significant experience in developing and maintaining large monolithic server-side web applications, including making changes to APIs to carry features to completion
- Broad understanding of a spectrum of stacks; expert understanding of dependencies, needs, impacts, and risks across technical areas within a domain
- Our team focuses primarily on the back end, but a candidate for this role would ideally have experience with and an understanding of the entire technological ecosystem
- Deep understanding of performance, scalability, and security best practices, with the ability to recommend system-level improvements to mitigate concerns for broad systems
- Known as a go-to consultant that engineers turn to for guidance in these areas
- Experience designing and integrating with third-party APIs and building extensible systems that support diverse downstream toolsets and data consumers
- Experience designing frameworks to enable a culture of defensive testing; consistently debugging the toughest issues throughout the stack regardless of environment, finding root cause or viable workarounds
- A track record of effective collaboration with engineers to develop abstractions and patterns that make it easy to build reliable software
- Eagerness to explore and refactor legacy code — we've been doing this for a while now and could use an engineer who brings an empathetic but forward-thinking approach to working in an older codebase
- Ability to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders and to collaboratively translate business requirements and strategic goals into technical solutions, modifying communication style to fit the audience
- Experience coaching engineers on coaching and mentoring others; fostering a culture of delivering specific praise and constructive feedback
- Can provide support and stability during times of urgency; contributes holistic solutions in post-mortems
- An inclusive, generous working style: you like to mentor, collaborate, and elevate your team by supporting your peers, providing coaching and guidance to multiple team members, and anticipating where your intervention would be helpful
- This posting is for a full-time, remote, salaried position
- Travel may be required on a limited basis to attend all-staff and departmental retreats (1-2 times per year). Additional travel may be required for select positions
- This role requires availability during established, regular business hours (Mon-Fri) and is expected to be a part of an on-call rotation which will result in working nontraditional hours as needed
- Employees can expect to work with distributed teams across all U.S. time zones
- Our roles require extended technology usage, and proficiency with virtual communication tools such as Zoom and Slack
- Regular attendance in virtual meetings is inherent to every position
- ActBlue is unable to sponsor work visas at this time
Benefits
- Flexible work schedules and an unlimited time-off policy
- Fully paid and trans-inclusive health, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families; plus fully-paid health reimbursement arrangement to use for out of pocket expenses and fully-paid short- and long-term disability
- Fully paid basic and AD&D life insurance and a voluntary supplemental life insurance option
- Dependent and health care flexible spending account options
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) benefits for employees
- Automatic 2% Employer-paid 401K contribution, plus up to an additional 6% match on employee contributions
- A minimum of three months paid medical, family and parental leave (for all new parents, adoptions included)
- Commuter or home-office benefits, including a $1,000 home-office setup allowance for all new full-time remote employees
- Additional perks including quarterly snack deliveries and digital subscriptions to the Boston Globe & New York Times
- Full-time, remote position
Company Overview