Software Engineer, Geospatial Data

Civitech•Austin, TX

20h•Remote

About The Position

The Engineering team builds scalable, secure, and user-friendly applications that empower progressive organizations, drive civic engagement, and promote democratic participation. We work closely with product and data teams to deliver impactful solutions. The Software Engineer, Geospatial Data position sits on our team responsible for civic and geospatial data and reports to that team's Engineering Manager. This team focuses on: Tools used by our research team to collect and maintain civic and constituent data, including geographic and boundary data. Our GraphQL API product, used both internally and externally. Data export products that provide civic data to customers. Data engineering for our Voter Registration Mail product. Our work spans backend-heavy data products and internal UI tools where reliability is critical. A core challenge lies in evolving our API and data export offerings, thoughtfully advancing functionality and the developer experience while maintaining stability across existing contracts.

Requirements

3–5 years of software engineering experience.
Strong in Python, especially for data pipelines, scripting, and automation.
Comfortable working across the stack and picking up other languages and frameworks as needed.
Experience working with cloud environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform or AWS; experience with Azure is also valuable.
Skilled in facilitating collaboration between engineers and with partner teams.
Experienced with identifying issues and helping to develop solutions, including diagnosing and fixing data quality problems.
Used to being actively engaged in planning the team's work via backlog refinement, helping to write user stories, etc.
Practiced with written and verbal communication that helps make complex code accessible.
Prioritize writing maintainable and well-documented code.
Demonstrate the ability to effectively give and receive constructive feedback, especially with other engineers.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with geospatial data - shapefiles, GeoJSON, projections/coordinate systems, and spatial joins.
Experience with geospatial libraries and tooling (PostGIS, GeoPandas, Shapely, GDAL/OGR, Fiona, etc.).
Familiarity with political geography: precincts, city council and county districts, and state/federal legislative districts.
Understanding of how census geographies differ from political boundaries, and the challenges of mapping between them.
Awareness of the current redistricting landscape and how court-ordered and legislative map changes affect downstream data.
Understanding of U.S. elections administration and/or campaign operations.
Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript (used within and without Rails).
Knowledge of building and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications, including performing upgrades, using GraphQL-Ruby, Turbo/Stimulus, Rspec, etc.
Understanding of API design, development, and usage, especially GraphQL APIs.
Experience contributing to automated test suites and ensuring robust coverage.
Expertise in PostgreSQL (with PostGIS for geospatial data).
Experience working with cloud data warehouses, particularly BigQuery.
Knowledge of building scalable data pipelines with dbt.
Knowledge of scaling and high-availability techniques.
Experience maintaining infrastructure hosted on AWS or GCP.
Experience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools, especially GitLab CI and/or GitHub Actions.
Familiarity with Terraform for Infrastructure-as-Code.

Responsibilities

Participate with other engineers in the design, implementation, and maintenance of Civitech's applications and infrastructure.
Collaborate cross-functionally with product, research, and data science teams to develop features from participation in requirements definition through to testing and documentation.
Build scalable, secure, and high-performing features in a cloud environment.
Communicate effectively with team members and contribute to an open and inclusive engineering culture.
Grow your technical skills and contribute to effective team development practices.
Optimizing data availability: Developing new features to automatically make election research data available in our customer-facing tools, reducing latency to our end users.
Building data pipelines: Developing and maintaining pipelines that ingest, normalize, and serve civic data so it's reliably available to our tools and customers - including geospatial data like shapefiles and political boundary files.
Bridging data silos: Designing strategies to effectively and broadly share data between operational PostgreSQL databases and BigQuery data warehouses to enrich existing datasets.
Working with political geography: Reconciling census shapes against political shapes (precincts, council districts, legislative districts) and keeping that data current as new maps move through legislatures and the courts.
Improving data quality: Diagnosing and fixing bad data - from malformed geometries to inconsistent identifiers - so downstream tools and customers get reliable results.