Engineer II, Digital Engagement

Tavern Research•Chicago, IL

9d•$146,500 - $172,000•Onsite

About The Position

As an Engineer II at Tavern, you’ll build tools that give our partners an edge in the noisy, chaotic world of politics, media, and influence. Some days, you’ll extend production systems to support new workflows; other days, you’ll prototype ideas that could become our next core product. You’ll work on problems of moderate to wide scope, sometimes straightforward, sometimes full of unknowns, and you’ll be trusted to navigate both. That might mean stitching together APIs to move faster, integrating LLMs into new tools, or diagnosing why a data pipeline that ran perfectly yesterday is suddenly producing nonsense. This role begins as a high-impact individual contributor position, but we value engineers who can mentor teammates, coordinate small project efforts, and grow into team leadership over time. If you’re excited by pairing technical depth with increasing ownership and leadership responsibility, this role offers a clear path in that direction. You won’t just write code, you’ll help shape technical decisions. You’ll collaborate closely with product and engineering leadership to influence how we build, not just what we build. While remaining hands-on day to day, you’ll be expected to anticipate bottlenecks, design with scale in mind, and ensure technical debt doesn’t outpace our velocity. If building fast, shipping often, and learning from the weird and unexpected sounds exciting, we'd love to hear from you. We value in-person collaboration and expect employees to work regularly from our Chicago office. We’re hiring for multiple roles and reviewing applications on a rolling basis—if the posting is still up, the position is still open.

Requirements

4+ years of professional engineering experience, with a track record of owning projects end to end and supporting systems in production with increasing independence.
Hands-on experience supporting production systems, with a track record of debugging issues and strengthening monitoring and alerting over time.
Proficiency in Python, JavaScript and Docker.
Experience working with databases, APIs, and infrastructure.
Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and system design
Familiarity with version control systems and collaborative development workflows
Ability to manage multiple priorities with minimal supervision
Strong problem-solving skills, with good judgment in ambiguous situations

Nice To Haves

Political experience is a plus, not a requirement.
Experience with (or strong interest in) social platform APIs, data pipelines, or experiment/measurement systems

Responsibilities

Build and extend product features, balancing reliability with experimentation.
Own and evolve core product features and systems, contributing to architectural decisions and carrying work through to production.
Support the growth of teammates through code reviews, technical guidance, and setting a strong example for code quality and testing.
Work across a moderate-to-wide scope of problems, handling both straightforward tasks and areas with significant unknowns.
Contribute to testing, code review, and stability practices, helping improve team standards.
Prototype and experiment with new ideas and technologies (e.g., APIs, LLMs, AI coding tools, data pipelines).
Collaborate with product and engineering peers, and occasionally clients, to ensure solutions solve the right problems.
Identify and propose improvements to tools, workflows, and systems.
Weigh trade-offs between speed, scale, and reliability, and help drive technical decisions that align with product and business goals.