LOCATION: Remote within the US
Daily Kos is the nation's largest liberal online political community, news organization, and activism hub. Powered by millions of highly engaged supporters, we're building progressive power by connecting grassroots activists to hundreds of people-powered organizations and campaigns.
We are seeking an experienced and results driven Principal Applications Software Engineer to help guide and scale DailyKos.com. You will be hands-on and will actively collaborate with a team of 11 to guide projects, implement best practice solutions, champion the elimination of technical debt, and translate requirements into delivered products. Applicants must be self-motivated, efficient, and capable of delivering results with limited guidance.
Daily Kos is an exciting workplace! Our site is used by hundreds of thousands of people a day who care deeply about progressive politics and are working to affect real political change. We provide an extensive feature set that extends from blogging to activism and beyond, built on top of a modern tool chain that includes Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, SASS, JavaScript, React/Redux, Nginx, Varnish, and AWS/S3/Cloudfront. We have an energized team of great people with diverse backgrounds and skill sets. If you're interested in a position that offers more than just a technical challenge, we'd love for you to join our passionate and dedicated team.
Our offices are in Oakland, CA and Washington D.C., however, we are open to fully remote applicants.
Responsibilities
- Contribute to engineering organization impact
- Collaborate with coworkers across the org to scope, design, and deliver solutions for large, complex challenges in the Daily Kos platform
- Partner with internal stakeholders to deliver high quality product releases in suitable time frames
- Actively participate in architectural planning and implementation
- Effectively communicate technical vision
- Evangelize best practices internally and externally
- Clearly communicate technical issues and tie work to company objectives
- Design for scale and reliability with the future in mind and do critical R&D
- Persistently debug the toughest issues through the entire stack regardless of environment, finding root cause or a viable workaround
- Drive foundational work benefiting their domain and engineering overall
- De-escalate conflicts and build consensus between team members about technical matters
Experience
- At least 8 years experience with React or Ruby on Rails
- Working knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- Working familiarity of MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS, Varnish, and Redis preferred but not required
- Solid understanding of Linux
- Experience with large and complex code bases, utilizing API design techniques to help keep code clean and maintainable
Qualifications
- Deep understanding of modern web application best practices
- Thought leader highly skilled in making technical decisions, influencing architecture, and prioritization across multiple teams
- Ability to anticipate technical challenges, explore alternatives and trade-offs thoroughly
- In-depth understanding of full stack;can navigate and make legacy code maintainable
- Focused on defining patterns and operational guidelines for your domain
- Capable of successfully planning and delivering complex, multi-team, or system projects
- Identifies problems that need to be solved and advocates for their prioritization
- Able to reduce unneeded complexity
- Comfortable with the Agile and Lean development process
- Able to actively diagnose and address data scaling and optimization issues
- Ambitious spirit and focus on delivering value into customers hands with excellent communication
- Familiarity with principles of good user experience
- Excellent communication skills, primarily in a virtual work environment
- Familiarity with the Daily Kos application and commitment to become a platform expert
- Willingness to travel occasionally for events or retreats
Salary Range: $130,000 - $150,000
Benefits:
This position is a 40 hour/week, full-time exempt position. Candidates must be legally eligible to work in the United States. The position offers a flexible work environment, the ability to work remotely or from home, competitive salary, excellent benefits including: full medical, dental and vision benefits, 401K with a company match, remote worker stipend, professional development stipend, company-paid holidays, a generous vacation package, traumatic grief leave, as well as employer-paid parental/family leave. Our organizational commitment to personal growth and work-life balance reduces churn and encourages a very rewarding long term position.
At Daily Kos, we believe that the diversity of ideas, experiences, and cultures that our employees contribute to our organization help us be more effective activists, and we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We have a team of amazing people with different backgrounds and talents that are energized by the day's news events, and people united by common cause. We're a company that loves learning and supports growth and training for all our employees.
Women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals strongly encouraged to apply.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Note: Daily Kos does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to any recruiting alias or employee.
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