Senior Software Engineer (Remote)

MoveOn
Posted 3 years ago
Senior Software Engineer (Remote) at MoveOn
Full time • Competitive pay • Excellent benefits
Work from anywhere in the contiguous US

Apply here: https://grnh.se/721405b91us

Application deadline: Tuesday Aug 3 at 4pm ET

About MoveOn

MoveOn is a diverse and vibrant community of millions of people working together to create progressive change in America. We are an innovative campaigning organization that supports people throughout the country to take action through driving impactful campaigns that influence the behavior of people and institutions, shape the outcomes of elections, and expand the realities of what’s possible. We organize to challenge entrenched power, while pursuing economic, racial, and social justice and a vision of a country in which everyone can thrive.

MoveOn has a vital role to play in securing progress during the Biden-Harris administration and in organizing the grassroots to set up election wins in 2021, 2022, and beyond. We are building a powerful, multiracial, and economic populist movement and fighting for progress on health care, climate, racial justice, and more. In service of that mission, in 2021 and beyond, MoveOn will drive impactful, movement-connected, multichannel, nimble campaigns aimed at impact.

To enable this work, we are hiring a passionate problem-solver who will help take digital organizing and campaigning to the next level. Join our team! Together, we will scale up and optimize the work of brilliant organizers, campaigners and fundraisers, and architect and build the next great generation of political tech.

About MoveOn's Tech team and systems

MoveOn’s millions of members generate thousands of requests a minute during spikes of member energy. We have ~10 production systems, with two systems running at significant scale and a mix of in-house and vendor platforms. We've piped terabytes of data from all our systems into a data warehouse that fuels ambitious analytics, fundraising, and engagement programs. 
At MoveOn, making decisions with data is a core part of how all work gets done. 

Like many nonprofit tech teams, we're a scrappy team, wear many hats, and work across the software stack. While we split our team of seven engineers between multiple projects at any given time, everyone on our team eventually works on all parts of our systems. We build, extend, and maintain infrastructure that powers campaigning, organizing and fundraising, and that amplifies the work of the analytics and mobile teams. We’ve created software management processes based on Agile to support our work in a flexible, all-remote environment and empower us to embed with organizers and work on tight political deadlines.

We believe in choosing the best language, platform, and tool for the job and are not language zealots, but we also recognize the switching cost of straddling too many languages. We do a lot of work in Python and Javascript and deploy most systems to AWS (check out our GitHub). You don’t need to come in with an exact match of experience;we will help you learn our systems and software stacks. We are deeply collaborative and spend lots of time pair-programming over Zoom video. We have a “no silly questions” policy and encourage egoless collaboration.

The MoveOn Tech Team values:


  • Cooperative
     
  • Low ego and high output 
  • We are a team of humans that need boundaries and self-care 
  • Innovation comes from learning together
  • Purposeful
  • Move at the Speed of Trust
  • Equity Driven Development
  • Be careful to comply with the law and keep people and systems secure and safe
  • Generous
  • Try new things and innovate, as well as swiftly and happily sunset projects we cannot or should not sustain
  • Open-source by default
  • Work openly, publish often (cf: school for poetic computation)
  • In partnership with MoveOn's membership
  • Reduce barriers to engagement
  • Empower organizers locally
  • Work for the best interests of our members
  • Work toward high standards of digital consent in our tech platforms (FRIES consent - Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific )
  • Intentional thought partnership centering privacy


Responsibilities:
  • Write and review well-documented code that is easy to read, maintain, extend and scale.
  • Lead projects that span the entire software stack, including prototyping, front-end development, API development, high-performance back-end applications, database design, and system architecture.
  • Debug, analyze, and resolve scaling problems across a variety of web applications, with tactics like architecture simplification, adding caching layers or queues.
  • Create and contribute to open source projects that share MoveOn’s innovations back with the larger developer community.
  • Contribute to system architecture and build v. buy decisions.
  • Manage code and project complexity as both a tractable challenge and a liability.
  • Contribute to and lead team discussions on cultivating an equitable working environment.
  • Mentor, coach and learn from other team members.
  • Elicit business needs and priorities from nontechnical stakeholders and translate them into tech requirements, work plans and effective solutions, either yourself or in collaboration with our product team.
  • Work effectively with designers, product managers, analysts, fundraisers, organizers, campaigners, content producers.

Note: “Senior” doesn’t = a particular number of years. We understand everyone gets to a senior engineer level at different rates, and through different experiences. The skills list below is intended to encapsulate what it would take to be successful in a senior engineering role at MoveOn. We encourage you to apply even if you feel you have only 70% of the experience or don't feel confident about identifying as "senior".

Required skills and experience:
  • Fluency in at least one programming language and web development platform, with significant prior development experience in at least two programming languages.
  • Ability to write SQL queries from scratch, or learn quickly (we are not kidding about making decisions with data).
  • Experience carrying a >6 month long project over the finish line.
  • Experience debugging and resolving a major production problem.
  • Commitment to building a mutually supportive working environment where everyone can thrive.
  • Experience in both front-end and back-end development and the interactions between the two, including HTTP, CORS, CDN caching.
  • Experience scaling applications (e.g. with caching) and troubleshooting performance bottlenecks at the database and application layers.
  • Determined and thorough - can see a project through from idea to prototyping, design, production, scaling and beyond.
  • Ability to be effective in an organization whose staff all work remotely.

Location: Position may be based anywhere in the contiguous United States.

Salary and Benefits: At MoveOn, we commit to equity in our compensation philosophy and practices. We are committed to equal pay for equal work. To counter systemic pay inequality and compensation issues in this country, we have a nonnegotiable compensation practice. We utilize benchmarking and peer organization data to ensure we provide competitive nonprofit compensation and benefits. The salary for this position is $130,964. In addition to the base salary, we offer a home office subsidy based on your home location. We also offer an internet and phone subsidy of $2,100 and a health and wellness subsidy of $900 annually. All of these cash benefits are added to your bimonthly paycheck. We offer strong medical, dental, and vision benefits which are free to employees and children of employees (spouses or domestic partners can be added at a subsidized rate). We offer employer-paid premiums for life insurance;four weeks accrued paid vacation time per year, prorated for the period that you work;18 weeks of paid parental leave (birth, adoption, foster care placement of a child);10 days accrued paid sick time prorated for the period that you work;paid family medical leave;and 8 staff holidays and 6 floating holidays.  We contribute 5% to your 401(k) after six months of employment. We also offer $1K in professional development budget each year for each staff member.

MoveOn.org Civic Action and MoveOn.org Political Action provide 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.