Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

Who We Are

At Murmuration, we believe that America's promise is shaped and reshaped by the best ideas and ideals of its communities, and the dreams of the people who believe in a better life for themselves, their families, and each other.

We help organizations build power in their communities in four key ways: we organize a network of values-aligned partners; we provide deep, data-driven insights into people, places, and perspectives; we develop tools that make organizing and engagement easy and more effective; and we offer services that strengthen our partners' capacity to lead change in their communities.

We envision an America where every community has what it needs to help people lead healthy,

free, and dignified lives. We work to redesign the systems and structures we all depend on — how we learn, live, govern, and solve problems — so that they are just, equitable, resilient, and rooted in shared responsibility. By strengthening the ties that hold communities together, we aim for civic life defined by collective action and care, with effective leadership that truly represents everyone.

We are a collaborative, curious, and creative team of organizers, scientists, teachers, technologists, campaign veterans, and more who share the unwavering belief that we can use our gifts in service of transforming America — together.

We've built our team guided by the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And so we support each other relentlessly — rallying together to face challenges the same way we celebrate each other's wins.

About the Position

Do you see yourself as a mission-driven engineer who believes that great products emerge from strong teams? Do you thrive in inclusive, thoughtful environments where engineers hold themselves to high standards of technical excellence, ownership, and impact at scale?

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to contribute to one of our most ambitious efforts: building a new product from the ground up while raising the bar for how our entire engineering organization works.

Murmuration builds technology that helps our partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively in their communities. Our products weave together engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data with intuitive applications that help partners better understand and act within the communities they serve. Our team is intentionally multidisciplinary and partner-focused. We succeed together by aligning planning, execution, and learning across engineering, product, design, research, data, and partner success. We build complex, data-driven systems that need to work reliably during critical moments, scale as our partners grow, and remain understandable and maintainable as communities and their needs evolve.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will join the Explorer Team as we evolve the product 

into general availability from its pilot implementation. Explorer is a data visualization product that facilitates political data exploration using interactive maps, charts, and exportable tables, supplemented by an NLP-powered search function.

On this small, close-knit team, you will establish the engineering patterns, operational foundations, and testing strategies needed to evolve Explorer into a secure, reliable, GA-ready platform. You and the team will build Explorer’s core platform and user experience, expanding a near-greenfield code base to design, build, and evolve secure backend services, interactive data visualizations, and responsive user interfaces. You will also produce high-quality documentation that improves knowledge sharing, onboarding, and the long-term maintainability of the product.

In addition to your Explorer work, you will serve as a staff engineer across multiple projects, applying your expertise to solving some of the organization’s most complex challenges.

This role is suited for a deeply experienced individual contributor whose technical judgment and engineering rigor raises the quality of deliverables across the entire organization. You excel in near-greenfield settings where product priorities and direction can shift rapidly. Your commitment to building inclusive, high-trust, high-performing teams is visible across the technology organization. And you believe, like we do, that how we build is just as important as  what we build.

Job Level: IC5

What You’ll Do

Drive to General Availability

• Shape Explorer's technical future: advise on technical priorities, dependencies, and complexity; propose and defend well-reasoned solutions with clear documentation of tradeoffs and alternatives;
• Take a pilot implementation from limited release to general availability, including making early architectural decisions, validating technical assumptions, and iterating toward a scalable design;
• Harden experimental systems for production readiness, including reliability, performance, observability, testing, and operational excellence;
• Architect for the long term: design and build the systems and architectures that will serve Explorer for years, with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns;
• Improve and expand the existing code base: reinforce secure coding practices, identify vulnerabilities early, and treat data privacy and access control as first-class concerns;
• Drive test strategy, proactively identify and address technical risks, and drive quality improvements at the team level; and
• Reduce technical debt, improve system quality, and contribute to objectives that span the broader organization.

Elevate the Team

• Resolve ambiguity, navigate requirements that are actively being shaped, and bring structure and clarity without waiting for perfect specs;
• Establish best practices for test strategy, code quality, and system design; raise the technical bar across the organization through documentation, advocacy, and role modeling;
• Mentor senior engineers and help emerging technical leads build the judgment, ownership, and skills to grow; lead technical discussions, drive design consensus, and model the standards you expect from others; and
• Be like Ted Lasso: believe, build trust, and demonstrate kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability.

Lead Beyond Explorer

• Set technical direction across teams beyond Explorer; own objectives that span multiple teams and align with division and organizational goals; drive the strategy, planning, decision-making, and execution needed to achieve them;
• Lead significant initiatives spanning multiple teams and systems; align technical and non-technical stakeholders, communicate tradeoffs and risks clearly, and represent engineering in cross-organizational discussions and with product and leadership;
• Champion secure coding practices at a systemic level, identify vulnerabilities across the product, and treat data privacy and access control as organization-wide concerns; and
• Organize and lead incident response, involving the right people and delegating effectively; lead post-incident reviews including root cause analysis and clear prevention action items; follow through until learnings are shared and remediation is complete.

Requirements

Technical Depth and Judgement

• Deep, hands-on expertise across critical technical domains with the proven ability to lead system design, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices; your sound technical judgment shapes important decisions;
• Experience with event-driven and asynchronous processing patterns; solid understanding of the tradeoffs among different event-driven architectures with the ability to defend one choice over the other;
• Ability to reason across OLAP and OLTP data architectures and make sound design decisions for the systems that depend on them;
• Comfort making sound decisions with imperfect information; able to design long-term architectures with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns, and to clearly articulate tradeoffs and alternatives explored;
• Ability to communicate and defend well-reasoned solutions through written documentation, sharing context, what alternatives were considered, and how conclusions were reached;
• Be a proactive steward of technical quality, identifying and prioritizing technical debt, defining test strategy, and evaluating risk from bugs and architectural problems before they become blockers; and
• Skill at debugging the most complex problems at any level of the stack; ability to drive effective post-incident reviews with clear timelines, root cause analysis, and actionable prevention plans.

Scope, Initiative, and Execution 

• Proven ability to lead technical strategy and execution for significant initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems, balancing quality, performance, and cost while keeping stakeholders aligned on tradeoffs and risks;
• Proven experience in designing objectives aligned with division and organizational goals, anticipating technical challenges and proposing solutions before they become blockers;
• Demonstrated experience in the estimation of large, cross-team projects with significant unknowns, including mitigation plans for resolving those unknowns, breaking work into milestones and iterations to reduce risk and deliver incremental value;
• Proven strategies to involve the right people, delegate clearly, communicate consistently, and follow through as an owner until an objective is delivered; and
• Ability to multiply team and engineering effectiveness through technical leadership, tooling, infrastructure, and process improvements.

Organizational Impact

• A technical leader across multiple teams who can act without direct management responsibilities, influencing outcomes through role modeling, documentation, and advocacy rather than authority;
• Demonstrated track record as a mentor to senior engineers with a proven ability to develop future technical leaders, building their judgment, ownership, and skills through 1:1 guidance and small-group knowledge sharing;
• A driver of standards and best practices that raise the technical bar across the organization, creating processes that instill ownership behavior in others;
• Ability to represent engineering effectively in cross-functional discussions, leading alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders on complex, multi-team initiatives; and
• A leader by example, proactively sharing context and learnings, building POCs or prototypes where most cost-effective, and creating the kind of high-trust, high-performing team culture that makes everyone better.

What You Bring to the Table

Foundations

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated full-stack fluency and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of languages and technology stacks;
• Experience taking a product from beta to general availability, navigating the operational, quality, and cross-functional demands of a production launch;
• Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems;
• A test-driven mindset with experience writing, maintaining, and driving test strategy at the team or product level;
• A track record of effective collaboration with product, data science, and R&D teams, bridging technical and domain-specific perspectives across disciplines.

Data

• Solid foundation in relational databases, including PostgreSQL, writing fluent SQL, designing schemas, and reasoning about migrations and query performance;
• Experience with analytical or columnar datastores (e.g., Apache Pinot, ClickHouse, BigQuery, etc.);
• Experience working with modern data warehousing and transformation workflows powered by Snowflake and dbt;
• Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools such as Dagster or Airflow with an understanding of scheduling, dependency management, and pipeline reliability;
• Working knowledge of time series data modeling and its applications;
• Experience with caching layers such as Redis and the ability to drive decisions about caching strategy as part of system design.

Infrastructure and Observability

• Deep experience with cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and production-grade software at scale; production experience with AWS, including services for compute, storage, and observability;
• Proficiency with Docker, Make, or similar build tools, as well as environment scripting;
• Direct experience with observability tooling: logging, metrics, and tracing using tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana.

Security

• Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems.

Emerging and Specialized

• Hands-on experience integrating LLM or AI APIs (e.g., OpenAI) into production applications, including working with embeddings, retrieval, or natural language interfaces;
• Experience with geospatial or map-based data visualization and related JavaScript libraries.

Nice to Haves

• Familiarity with Voter File Data;
• Experience with or interest in political data;
• Background in political tech, civic tech, advocacy, or mission-driven organizations; and/or
• Experience applying AI/ML techniques to voter or political data.

Talented Software Engineers come from all walks of life and career. If you are passionate about civic engagement and technology, please apply, even if you do not check every box!

Benefits

Location and Compensation

This is a full-time, salaried position with a comprehensive benefits package, open

to candidates anywhere in the United States. 

The starting salary for this position is $225,324. We set compensation using market data and apply it consistently across the organization to ensure fairness and transparency for everyone in similar roles. 

Our Culture of Care

We work hard to create a culture of care to ensure that our staff are best equipped to lead happy, healthy, and balanced lives. To that end, we offer a comprehensive benefits package which includes:

• Health, vision, and dental insurance with 100% of premiums covered for you and qualifying family members;
• Retirement benefits with a 5% employer match;
• A flexible unlimited PTO plan;
• Generous paid parental leave;
• Pre-tax commuter benefits;
• A company laptop;
• A flexible remote work environment;
• A home office setup stipend for all new employees;
• Monthly reimbursement for remote work expenses;
• A yearly professional development fund;
• Mental health and wellness benefits through Calm and Better Help; 
• Yearly in-person staff retreats; and
• A welcoming culture that celebrates diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

At Murmuration, we believe a vibrant, representative democracy depends on the inclusion of diverse voices, lived experiences, and perspectives. The best ideas don’t come from a single person or ideology — they emerge at the intersection of different backgrounds, identities, and viewpoints. We are proud of our commitment to building an organization and culture shaped by respect, empathy, and collaboration, where our team’s diversity fuels innovation, civic engagement, and meaningful change. We welcome new colleagues who will help us nurture this collective effort. Join us.

An Equal-Opportunity Employer with a Commitment to Diversity

Murmuration is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and as an organization committed to diversity and the perspective of all voices, we consider applicants equally of race, gender, color, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, disability, political affiliation and national origin. We reasonably accommodate staff members and/or applicants with disabilities, provided they are otherwise able to perform the essential functions of the job.

Note: Murmuration is two organizations working together to pursue our mission of amplifying the power of civic engagement: Murmuration Research Institute, a 501(c)(3) that conducts research to identify, design, and create the data, tools, and insights that build healthier and more equitable communities; and Murmuration, Inc., a 501(c)(4) that supports organizations working across the country on the nation’s most challenging issues with access to data, tools, and research that build healthier and more equitable communities.