Software Engineer (Remote) at MoveOn

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

Application deadline: Friday, October 15th, 2021 at 6pm EST

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 7 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 believe there are no silly questions and encourage egoless collaboration.

Responsibilities:
  • Write and review well-documented code that is easy to read, maintain, extend, and scale.
  • Lead and contribute to 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 vs. 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.
  • Manage, translate, and prioritize requests from technical and non-technical colleagues.
  • Work effectively with designers, product managers, analysts, fundraisers, organizers, campaigners, content producers.
  • Collaborate with team members to learn and grow your own skills.

Note: We understand everyone gains skills at different rates and through different experiences. The skills list below is intended to encapsulate what it would take to be successful in an engineering role at MoveOn. We encourage you to apply even if you feel you have only 70% of the experience.

Required skills and experience:
  • Fluency in at least one programming language and web development platform.
  • Experience leading or contributing to a technically complex project.
  • Commitment to building a mutually supportive working environment where everyone can thrive.
  • Passionate about learning from and sharing knowledge with other engineers.
  • Experience debugging and resolving issues with production systems.
  • 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.

Additional skills and experience that are nice to have:
  • Experience or interest in mentoring and coaching other engineers.
  • Experience in both front-end and back-end development and the interactions between the two, including HTTP, CORS, CDN caching.
  • Ability to write SQL queries from scratch, or learn quickly (we are not kidding about making decisions with data).
  • Experience scaling applications and troubleshooting performance bottlenecks at the database and application layers.

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 ranges from $103,230 to $130,964, depending on experience. 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.