Software Architect

Murmuration

2h•$296,965•Remote

About The Position

Do you see yourself as a mission-driven systems thinker who loves to build products that make a difference at scale? Do you thrive in inclusive and thoughtful environments with leaders who empower you to influence how an organization learns, grows, and delivers impact? We at Murmuration are seeking a Software Architect to act as a force multiplier for our engineering organization to help us build the future of civic tech. Murmuration builds technology that helps our partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively in their communities. Our products weave together data (engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data) and software applications that help partners better understand and organize outreach among the people they serve. Our team is intentionally multidisciplinary and partner-focused. We succeed together by aligning planning, execution, and learnings from engineering, product, design, research, data, and partner success teams. We build complex, data-driven systems, CRM-style apps, and communication channels that need to work reliably during critical moments, scale as our partners grow, and remain understandable and maintainable as communities and their needs evolve. As a Software Architect, you will be one of Murmuration’s most senior individual contributors and a key technical leader across the organization. You will have the opportunity to partner with senior leadership to solve Murmuration's hardest and most ambiguous technical challenges. In this non-management role, you will lead through influence and apply your deep technical expertise and strong judgment, and take a pragmatic, hands-on approach grounded in partner needs and real-world system behavior. Your work will bridge business strategy with technical execution to design and evolve how Murmuration builds software and supports our partners. This includes architectural standards, technical decision-making frameworks, and cross-team alignment mechanisms that improve velocity, quality, and long-term systems health. This role is both organizational in scope and may require contributing directly when doing so helps teams move forward. You will drive decisions across multiple teams by clarifying tradeoffs, identifying risks, and helping the organization move ahead even when the path is not fully certain. You will partner closely with engineering managers, tech leads, product, and design leaders to ensure technical plans align with user needs, reduce friction in delivering value, and support Murmuration’s long-term mission. You will help the organization make better technical decisions, faster, while raising the bar for rigor, clarity, and accountability. This role offers the opportunity to shape Murmuration's long-term technical and leadership trajectory, elevate engineering effectiveness across teams, and make impact on the future of our products, data, and systems which empower our communities.

Requirements

Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, high-leverage problem spaces where influence matters more than authority
Strong systems thinking, end-to-end perspective, and architectural judgement, with a clear instinct for second-order effects (anticipating long-term, indirect consequences of technical and architectural decisions)
Exceptional communication skills, particularly in facilitating complex technical trade-offs among senior engineers and leaders
Effective engagement with exec stakeholders to translate engineering constraints, risks, and opportunities into product and business context, and ability to translate business priorities into technical strategy
Coaching mindset and a genuine desire to uplevel others via mentorship/sponsorship, design review, and lived example
Be like Ted Lasso: Believe. Build trust. Demonstrate: Kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability. Lift up the team
Bias toward action, focus on outcomes vs outputs, model "good enough" vs perfection, build durable solutions that improve how teams work not just what they ship
Ability to synthesize multi-faceted problems into strategic roadmaps, prioritize, estimate technical complexity, composition/timelines for milestones, identify gaps and glue with a mindset toward improving reliability, scalability, performance, cost-to-serve, development velocity, operational stability, and long-term sustainability
Ability and motivation to deeply understand customer needs, design patterns, and actual customer usage across systems to uplevel hand-offs between teams and delight users
15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with sustained impact as a senior tech leader (Staff+, Principal, Architect, or equivalent)
Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct people management
Experience leading architectural evolution or transformation in established organizations, particularly at the intersection of technology and organizational structure
Strong architectural judgment across system design, scalability, reliability, and performance trade-offs
Experience establishing or evolving technical decision-making mechanisms (design reviews, architecture forums, decision records)
Track record of modeling high standards for technical design quality, documentation, and peer review
Executive-level communication skills, with experience representing senior IC perspectives in engineering leadership or executive forums
Expert-level understanding of database systems and cloud-native architectures (e.g. AWS Lambda, Fargate, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions)
Deep experience with modern cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure) and Kubernetes-based infrastructure is preferred
Strong knowledge of OLAP/OLTP relational (SQL) and document (NoSQL) data storage systems and expertise scaling them (e.g. MongoDB, Apache Pinot, Snowflake, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch, Solr)
Proficiency with modern development practices, including CI/CD and DevOps methodologies
Hands-on experience with at least one major backend language (e.g. Java, node/TypeScript, Python, Rust) and strong familiarity with a second
Extensive knowledge in software architecture patterns (microservices, service-oriented, event-driven) and stellar engineering practices

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with some BE technologies: Rest/GraphQL
Queues (AWS SQS, Kafka, Pusher, SNS)
Orchestration (Airflow)
Monitoring/Observability (CloudWatch, DataDog)
Foundational knowledge of security best practices and compliance implications
Frontend language (e.g. JavaScript, TypeScript)
Frontend frameworks (React, Angular)
Experience with civic assets (voter data, polling, constituent modeling)

Benefits

Health, vision, and dental insurance with 100% of premiums covered for you and qualifying family members
Retirement benefits with a 5% employer match
A flexible unlimited PTO plan
Generous paid parental leave
Pre-tax commuter benefits
A company laptop
A flexible remote work environment
A home office setup stipend for all new employees
Monthly reimbursement for remote work expenses
A yearly professional development fund
Mental health and wellness benefits through Calm and Better Help
Yearly in-person staff retreats
A welcoming culture that celebrates diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.