Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. ActBlue is a nonprofit that builds tech and infrastructure for Democratic campaigns and progressive causes. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for initiatives in digital fundraising, focusing on integrating and managing contribution data across various toolsets.
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
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
Company Overview
ActBlue is nonprofit tech organization that builds fundraising tools for Democratic candidates, progressive causes, and nonprofits. It was founded in 2004, and is headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is https://secure.actblue.com/.