Staff Technologist

Worth Rises•New York, NY

22d•$104,000 - $104,000•Remote

About The Position

Worth Rises seeks a Staff Technologist (exempt), working remotely, to build and maintain the technical infrastructure behind our public-facing research tools and technology solutions that bring our thought leadership and new functionalities to policymakers, journalists, organizers, and impacted people. The Staff Technologist will own the systems that power our public-facing technology, execute and advise on technical strategy for new tools, and coordinate with external technology partners to expand what our small but mighty research team can do. This role reports to the Director of Research & Data Innovation and works cross-functionally with our Advocacy and Narrative teams. Worth Rises is a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches. Partnering with directly impacted people, we work to expose the commercialization of the criminal legal system and organize and advocate to protect the economic resources extracted from affected communities and strip the prison industry of its power.

Requirements

At least five years of experience as an engineer or developer with a portfolio of tech tools and solutions built from scratch, including at least one example of a shipped public-facing tool, map, or data product that demonstrates attention to usability for non-technical audiences.
Demonstrated ability to bridge technical and non-technical contexts; able to assess a codebase, identify what matters, and communicate trade-offs clearly to colleagues without a technical background.
Proficiency in Python for data work, with working knowledge of libraries like pandas for data transformation, scraping tools such as BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, or Playwright for sites that require browser automation.
Experience calling and working with external APIs, including LLM APIs and geocodingm for structured data extraction and transformation.
Experience with Airtable, with the ability to evaluate when to use which and migrate to other no-code/low-code platforms.
Familiarity with data validation and normalization techniques, including entity resolution and record linkage for matching messy records across sources (e.g., variations of the same corporate name or facility); experience with libraries like fuzzywuzzy, dedupe, or recordlinkage is a plus.
Experience scheduling and automating recurring data jobs using GitHub Actions or comparable CI/CD tooling, and comfort with containerized deployment environments (Docker, AWS ECS/Fargate, or equivalent) sufficient to run, update, and monitor a production pipeline.
Comfort extracting data from non-standard sources, ideally including PDFs (using tools like pdfplumber or tabula-py) and scanned documents.
Precision and care across every step of the data pipeline, from scraping through publishing, with an understanding that journalists, policymakers, organizers, and impacted families rely on the credibility of our public-facing tools.
Strong project management skills, technical judgment, and the ability to scope realistically — knowing when to build, when to outsource, and when to push back on a project's scope.
Strong instinct for usability — what makes a public-facing tool clear, intuitive, and trustworthy for a non-technical user landing on it cold.
Genuine commitment to our organizational values: act with integrity, focus on impact, deliver excellence, get it done, and operate with intellectual curiosity (visit worthrises.org/jointhefight).

Nice To Haves

Experience with libraries like fuzzywuzzy, dedupe, or recordlinkage is a plus.

Responsibilities

Co-develop the organization’s technology strategy with the Executive Director, Chief Narrative Officer, and Director of Research & Data Innovation.
Execute the organization’s technology strategy, auditing, refining, and building the organization’s portfolio of technology-based research tools and industry solutions.
Surface relevant technical learning resources, tools, and collaboration opportunities to the Director of Research & Data Innovation to inform day-to-day work and longer-term projects.
Source, scope, and coordinate internal and external collaborators across all technical projects.
Create documentation, including well-structured READMEs, clear docstrings, and data dictionaries, that make tech tools and solutions legible to colleagues and future maintainers.
Serve as the in-house technical lead for Open Connect, coordinating the development of the platform with the support of external developers, fellows, and contractors.
Assess the existing codebase, identify gaps, and contribute code directly where needed to move the project toward deployment.
Steward completed platform to conduct agency pilots, ensuring adaptability to specific needs, collecting feedback from all stakeholders, and refining code for full launch.
Serve as in-house technical lead and principal builder for the Correctional Medical Malpractice Map, coordinating with external technologists as necessary.
Support the build of the Correctional Medical Malpractice Map through launch, collecting feedback from a small set of advisors, and own ongoing maintenance.
Own the data pipeline for the Connect Families Now Telecom Map including scraper maintenance, cleaning and transformation, and monthly publishing to the site and GitHub.
Run validations for the Connect Families Now Telecom Map in close collaboration with the Director of Research & Data Innovation.
Stabilize and automate the corporate database updates and maintenance, including the Airtable and GitHub infrastructure.
Connect with Advocacy, Narrative, and Operations teams to understand their needs and scope an internal dashboard.
Build and maintain an internal dashboard that can both support day-to-day activities (e.g. legislative bill tracking, social listening, etc.) and track our organizational goals and impact metrics.
Support the Director of Finance & Operations in developing the organization’s internal technology strategy, such as policies and protocols around cyber security and AI-use.
Support the Digital Associate with ad hoc website development needs.