Staff Data Engineer

Organizational Overview

Do you want to ensure that progressive organizations have access to the best possible data, technology, and technical expertise? We know movement organizing and advocacy are more urgent than ever and many organizations and activists cannot easily access the tools to scale their work. 

Launched in 2018, The Movement Cooperative (TMC) is a nonprofit founded with the aim of creating a cooperative community addressing these structural challenges. Currently, our membership stands at nearly 80 national member organizations, 13 state-based member organizations, and over 1400 affiliate member organizations covered under our licenses. We leverage the collective purchasing power of our membership to secure cooperatively held data and technology licenses shared across membership and invest in common infrastructure like technical staff to support our members in their work. TMC is a member cooperative -- our board is primarily elected by and made up of representatives from our member organizations.

Position Overview

Do you want to support a mission-driven organization that aligns your philosophical and professional passions? The Staff Data Engineer will be the leading technical expert at The Movement Cooperative. They will play a key role in shaping the technical development of the organization including architecting new systems, evaluating and selecting new tools, instituting best practices, and mentoring the engineering team.

The Staff Data Engineer will be an individual contributor but will lend their expertise frequently in long-term planning and mentorship capacities.

The Staff Data Engineer will:

• Take a lead role in architecting data pipelines, with emphasis on interoperability of tool data
• Architect new systems, own tool selection, and lead technical aspects of the team vision
• Create design patterns that can be adopted by other teams (e.g. Solutions and Analytics Engineering) to deliver member-specific work
• Work with external partners such as MoveOn and the Movement Infrastructure Working Group (MIG) toward common data best practices for the progressive movement
• Serve as a thought partner to the Director of Engineering and CTO
• Drive best practices for software development and dev ops
• Implement CI/CD best practices
• Develop and implement an observability strategy
• Play a leading role in the design and maintenance of the data warehouse
• Lead the analysis and optimization of the warehouse for cost savings and performance
• Ensure security best practices are implemented
• Own quality of the overall code base
• Design and implement improvements to the team’s coding best practices
• Drive development of a testing strategy and increase in test coverage
• Contribute individually to the ongoing technical and sprint work of the team
• Mentor and support other members of the team
• Increase the overall depth of engineering knowledge on the team
• Pair with team members and provide feedback on pull requests
• Support the Director and CTO in building a cooperative and evolving team
• Support efforts to level up other teams in technical capacity and proficiency

Qualifications

A successful Staff Data Engineer will have the following experience and skills:

• 5+ years of relevant software and/or data engineering experience
• 2+ years leading technical projects
• Deep familiarity with Python and SQL
• Experience architecting and maintaining complex environments made up of both custom-built applications and third-party applications, especially at scale
• Experience with implementing development best practices, including CI/CD, testing, and observability
• Comfort with data storage, data warehouse, task automation offerings and managing containerized orchestration (e.g. S3, Redshift, BigQuery, EC2, Kubernetes) on at least one of AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Demonstrated flexibility and adaptability to lead and motivate teams, guide others without direct authority, and influence organizational leadership to collective success
• Interest in overseeing and guiding engineering work that ranges from data engineering to full-stack web development
• Ability to coach and mentor engineers, including those who may have more or less content experience than oneself
• Dedication to furthering the reach and impact of TMC members' work
• Superior verbal and written communication, excellent presentation skills, and the ability to articulate complex concepts across varied functional audiences, including funders
• Commitment to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion into everyday work

We especially encourage applications from people who have any of these additional skills, which are preferred but not required:

• Experience working on campaigns, electorally focused, advocacy, or political data organizations
• Comfort with a fully remote work environment
• Experience with common open source software packages used for ETL/ELT including dbt, Airbyte, Parsons, etc.
• Previous DevOps experience
• Experience contributing to or robust participation in an open source community
• Experience building technical documentation
• Experience with the product development lifecycle

Physical Requirements 

• Prolonged periods of working on a computer

Location Requirements 

• While TMC’s workplace is remote, we require staff members to reside in and work in the continental United States. 

Benefits

The Movement Cooperative is dedicated to providing all employees a competitive salary, world-class healthcare, dental and vision benefits, retirement, unlimited paid vacation and sick days, flexible holidays, and all-staff holidays, remote virtual office, paid parental and adoption family leaves, and health and wellness benefits. The salary range for this position is $120,000 - $134,999 USD annually. This is a full-time exempt position. 

This position is within a union-represented collective bargaining unit, and specific terms and conditions of employment may be subject to a future collective bargaining agreement between TMC and the Union.

Next Steps

Please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing why you are interested in this role and your qualifications, in PDF format.

Here’s what you can expect from our interview process: 

• Application review
• Skills assessment
• Technical screening, 60 minutes
• Panel interview, 60 minutes
• Half-day final interview, including pairing and meeting with leadership

Applications must be submitted by 6 pm ET on December 13, 2024.

We are looking to fill this position by February 2025.

Note: TMC will be closed for winter break December 23, 2024–January 5, 2025.

 The Movement Cooperative is an equal opportunity employer. 

The Movement Cooperative recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, citizenship status, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law.

At The Movement Cooperative, we have a clear vision: to be the organization where a diverse mix of talented people want to be, to stay and do their best work. We pride ourselves on bringing the best to our members, and we know our organization runs on the hard work and dedication of our passionate and creative employees.