Staff Data Platform Engineer

Murmuration

2d•Remote

About The Position

Murmuration builds technology that helps our partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively in their communities. Our products weave together engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data with intuitive applications that help partners better understand and act within the communities they serve. Our team is intentionally multidisciplinary and partner-focused. We succeed together by aligning planning, execution, and learning across engineering, product, design, research, data, and partner success. We build complex, data-driven systems that need to work reliably during critical moments, scale as our partners grow, and remain understandable and maintainable as communities and their needs evolve. Murmuration needs a Staff Data Platform Engineer who improves how teams provision, secure, monitor, troubleshoot, and operate production data systems. The role is hands-on, but its larger purpose is leverage: reusable infrastructure, better defaults, clearer playbooks, and stronger operational visibility. This Staff role oversees operational efficiency: tuning, right-sizing, and choosing data stores. The Staff Data Platform Engineer is one of the key subject matter experts for datastores. The expertise includes designing, deploying, optimizing, securing, and maintaining databases in the cloud. Each team owns its own data stores, architecture, and access patterns, and you’ll help shape how those choices get made. Your scope will be both wide across teams, stacks, and technologies, as well as deep with a team and solution as required. This role is suited for a deeply experienced individual contributor whose technical judgment and engineering rigor raises the quality of deliverables across the entire organization. You excel in settings where product priorities and direction can shift rapidly. Your commitment to building inclusive, high-trust, and high-performing teams is visible across the technology organization. And you believe, like we do, that how we build is just as important as what we build.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated data specialization and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of transactional and analytic scenarios
Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems
A test-driven mindset with experience writing, maintaining, and driving test strategy at the team or product level
A track record of effective collaboration with product, data science, and R&D teams, bridging technical and domain-specific perspectives across disciplines
Experience with using AI as a daily assistant, along with the judgement needed to know when and where to best use or not use AI
Expert level experience with No-SQL, relational, and columnar data stores: either direct or transferable operating experience with Mongo, DynamoDb, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake
Expert level ability to write fluent SQL and No-SQL, design schemas, and define migrations and optimize read and write performance
Deep data design skills including No-SQL collections and indexing, relational normalization, and data warehousing facts and dimensions
Experience working with transformation tools such as dbt
Experience with data replication and change data capture (CDC) tools such as Kafka source connectors, Database Migration Services (DMS), or AirByte
Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools such as Dagster or Airflow with an understanding of scheduling, dependency management, and pipeline reliability
Experience with streaming data pipelines such as Flink
Working knowledge of time series data modeling and its applications
Working knowledge of geospatial data modeling and usage
Deep experience with cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and production-grade software at scale; production experience with AWS, including services for compute, storage, and observability
Proficiency with IAC tooling such as CDK, SAM, Serverless Framework, or Terraform
Working knowledge of deployment pipelines such as Git Hub Actions or Bit Bucket Pipelines
Direct experience with observability tooling: logging, metrics, and tracing using tools such as CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana
Deep, hands-on expertise across critical technical domains with the proven ability to lead system design, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices; your sound technical judgment shapes important decisions
Ability to choose the best tool for a scenario by optimizing the most functional coverage for the least total cost of ownership
Ability to reason across No-SQL vs. relational stores, transactional vs. analytic data architectures, and make sound design decisions for the systems that depend on them
Comfort making sound decisions with imperfect information; able to design long-term architectures with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns, and to clearly articulate tradeoffs and alternatives explored
Ability to communicate and defend well-reasoned solutions through written documentation, sharing context, what alternatives were considered, and how conclusions were reached
A proactive steward of technical quality, identifying and prioritizing technical debt, defining test strategy, and evaluating risk from bugs and architectural problems before they become blockers
Skill at debugging the most complex problems at any level of the stack
Proven ability to lead technical strategy and execution for significant initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems, balancing quality, performance, and cost while keeping stakeholders aligned on tradeoffs and risks
Proven experience in designing objectives aligned with division and organizational goals, anticipating technical challenges and proposing solutions before they become blockers
Demonstrated experience in the estimation of large, cross-team projects with significant unknowns, including mitigation plans for resolving those unknowns to reduce risk and deliver incremental value
Proven strategies to involve the right people, delegate clearly, communicate consistently, and follow through as an owner until an objective is delivered
Ability to multiply team and engineering effectiveness through technical leadership, tooling, infrastructure, and process improvements
Technical leadership across multiple teams, acting without direct management responsibilities, influencing outcomes through role modeling, documentation, and advocacy rather than authority
Demonstrated track record as a mentor to senior engineers with a proven ability to develop future technical leaders, building their judgment, ownership, and skills through 1:1 guidance and small-group knowledge sharing
A driver of standards and best practices that raise the technical bar across the organization, creating processes that instill ownership behavior in others
Ability to represent engineering effectively in cross-functional discussions, leading alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders on complex, multi-team initiatives
A leader by example, proactively sharing context and learnings, building POCs or prototypes where most cost-effective, and creating the kind of high-trust, high-performing team culture that makes everyone better

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Voter File Data
Experience with or interest in political data
Background in political tech, civic tech, advocacy, or mission-driven organizations

Responsibilities

Define guidelines and processes for data access and storage, champion best practices and lead by example, and build reusable and opinionated infrastructure as code to remove friction and increase the capability for all engineers.
Create re-usable IAC (infrastructure as code) to manage database resources
Secure the databases including provisioning human and system users via automation
Ensure operational monitoring is integrated with application and end-to-end data flow monitoring
Optimize database runtimes
Designing, implementing, and testing logical and physical database backup and recovery schemes in accordance with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity objectives
Review what data store is best suited for an application
Evaluate our database ecosystem and help refine the Data North Star
Evaluate tools and services and ensure our data tool belt is well balanced with power, extensibility, training, and operational effort
Help teams model their data schemas
Review data access libraries and general access patterns
Build paved roads for database infrastructure in the cloud: IAC is plug and play with minimal effort and has best practices built in
Improve and expand existing code bases: reinforce secure coding practices, identify vulnerabilities early, and treat data privacy and access control as first-class concerns
Reduce technical debt, improve system quality, and contribute to objectives that span the broader organization
Establish best practices for data schemas, data sharing, data access layers; raise the technical bar across the organization through documentation, reference implementations, advocacy, and role modeling
Mentor senior engineers and help emerging technical leads build the judgment, ownership, and skills to grow; lead technical discussions, drive design consensus, and model the standards you expect from others
Champion secure data practices at a systemic level, identify vulnerabilities across the product, and treat data privacy and access control as organization-wide concerns
Be like Ted Lasso: believe, build trust, and demonstrate kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability.

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