Source description
About the role
You have 3–5 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 are strong in Python , especially for data pipelines, scripting, and automation.
You're comfortable working across the stack and picking up other languages and frameworks as needed - our applications are built largely in Ruby on Rails and 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, including diagnosing and fixing data quality problems.
You are used to being actively engaged in planning the team's work via backlog refinement, helping to write user stories, etc.
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.
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.
Specialty: Geospatial & Political Data
This role has a particular focus on geospatial and political data, so experience in any of the following is a strong plus:
Hands-on experience with geospatial data - shapefiles, GeoJSON, projections/coordinate systems, and spatial joins.
Experience with geospatial libraries and tooling (PostGIS, GeoPandas, Shapely, GDAL/OGR, Fiona, etc.).
Familiarity with political geography: precincts, city council and county districts, and state/federal legislative districts.
Understanding of how census geographies differ from political boundaries, and the challenges of mapping between them.
Awareness of the current redistricting landscape and how court-ordered and legislative map changes affect downstream data.
Domain Knowledge
Understanding of U.S. elections administration and/or campaign operations.
Engineering Expertise
Proficiency in Python for scripting, automation, or data-related tasks.
Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript (used within and without Rails).
Knowledge of building and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications, including performing upgrades, using GraphQL-Ruby, Turbo/Stimulus, Rspec, etc.
Understanding of API design, development, and usage, especially GraphQL APIs.
Experience contributing to automated test suites and ensuring robust coverage.
Systems and Data
Expertise in PostgreSQL (with PostGIS for geospatial data).
Experience working with cloud data warehouses, particularly BigQuery.
Knowledge of building scalable data pipelines with dbt.
Knowledge of scaling and high-availability techniques.
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.
More at Civitech