Staff Software Engineer

Murmuration

9h•Remote

About The Position

Murmuration is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to contribute to building a new product from the ground up while raising the bar for how the entire engineering organization works. Murmuration builds technology that helps partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively. Their products integrate engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data with intuitive applications. The team is multidisciplinary and partner-focused, succeeding through alignment across engineering, product, design, research, data, and partner success. They build complex, data-driven systems that need to work reliably during critical moments, scale as partners grow, and remain understandable and maintainable. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will join the Explorer Team to evolve a data visualization product from its pilot implementation into general availability. Explorer facilitates political data exploration using interactive maps, charts, and exportable tables, with an NLP-powered search function. On this small team, you will establish engineering patterns, operational foundations, and testing strategies for a secure, reliable, GA-ready platform. You will build Explorer’s core platform and user experience, expanding a near-greenfield codebase to design, build, and evolve secure backend services, interactive data visualizations, and responsive user interfaces. You will also produce high-quality documentation. Additionally, you will serve as a staff engineer across multiple projects, applying expertise to solve complex organizational challenges. This role is for a deeply experienced individual contributor whose technical judgment and engineering rigor enhances the quality of deliverables across the organization. You excel in near-greenfield settings with rapidly shifting priorities and believe that how we build is as important as what we build.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated full-stack fluency and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of languages and technology stacks.
Experience taking a product from beta to general availability, navigating the operational, quality, and cross-functional demands of a production launch.
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, design, data science, and R&D teams, bridging technical and domain-specific perspectives across disciplines.
Solid foundation in relational databases, including PostgreSQL, writing fluent SQL, designing schemas, and reasoning about migrations and query performance.
Experience with analytical or columnar datastores (e.g., Apache Pinot, ClickHouse, BigQuery, etc.).
Experience working with modern data warehousing and transformation workflows powered by Snowflake and dbt.
Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools such as Dagster or Airflow with an understanding of scheduling, dependency management, and pipeline reliability.
Working knowledge of time series data modeling and its applications.
Experience with caching layers such as Redis and the ability to drive decisions about caching strategy as part of system design.
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 Docker, Make, or similar build tools, as well as environment scripting.
Direct experience with observability tooling: logging, metrics, and tracing using tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana.
Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems.
Hands-on experience integrating LLM or AI APIs (e.g., OpenAI) into production applications, including working with embeddings, retrieval, or natural language interfaces.
Experience with geospatial or map-based data visualization and related JavaScript libraries.
Deep, hands-on expertise across critical technical domains with the proven ability to lead system design, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices; sound technical judgment shapes important decisions.
Experience with event-driven and asynchronous processing patterns; solid understanding of the tradeoffs among different event-driven architectures with the ability to defend one choice over the other.
Ability to reason across OLAP and OLTP 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.
Be 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; ability to drive effective post-incident reviews with clear timelines, root cause analysis, and actionable prevention plans.
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, breaking work into milestones and iterations 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.
A technical leader across multiple teams who can act 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
Experience applying AI/ML techniques to voter or political data

Responsibilities

Shape Explorer's technical future: advise on technical priorities, dependencies, and complexity; propose and defend well-reasoned solutions with clear documentation of tradeoffs and alternatives.
Take a pilot implementation from limited release to general availability, including making early architectural decisions, validating technical assumptions, and iterating toward a scalable design.
Harden experimental systems for production readiness, including reliability, performance, observability, testing, and operational excellence.
Architect for the long term: design and build the systems and architectures that will serve Explorer for years, with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns.
Improve and expand the existing code base: reinforce secure coding practices, identify vulnerabilities early, and treat data privacy and access control as first-class concerns.
Drive test strategy, proactively identify and address technical risks, and drive quality improvements at the team level.
Reduce technical debt, improve system quality, and contribute to objectives that span the broader organization.
Resolve ambiguity, navigate requirements that are actively being shaped, and bring structure and clarity without waiting for perfect specs.
Establish best practices for test strategy, code quality, and system design; raise the technical bar across the organization through documentation, 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 expected from others.
Set technical direction across teams beyond Explorer; own objectives that span multiple teams and align with division and organizational goals; drive the strategy, planning, decision-making, and execution needed to achieve them.
Lead significant initiatives spanning multiple teams and systems; align technical and non-technical stakeholders, communicate tradeoffs and risks clearly, and represent engineering in cross-organizational discussions and with product and leadership.
Champion secure coding practices at a systemic level, identify vulnerabilities across the product, and treat data privacy and access control as organization-wide concerns.
Organize and lead incident response, involving the right people and delegating effectively; lead post-incident reviews including root cause analysis and clear prevention action items; follow through until learnings are shared and remediation is complete.

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