Engineering Manager

Location: Brooklyn, NY or remote within the US

Target Start Date: June 2019

Salary Range: $102,000 to $144,000 per year (offers will vary based on experience and location/cost-of-living calculations. Brooklyn-specific salary range is $120K–$144K.)

Benefits: Vision, dental, & medical insurance; 403(b) retirement savings plan; generous vacation policy; parental leave; long-term disability; employee assistance program

Level: Senior

At Democracy Works, we believe voting should fit the way we live. To that end, we build technology for both voters and election administrators that simplifies the process and ensures that no voter should ever have to miss an election.

What we do

TurboVote helps voters register, stay registered, and cast a ballot in every election, from municipal to national. TurboVote served more than 6 million voters in 2018 by building the largest college, nonprofit, and corporate voter engagement coalition in the country, including more than 300 campuses, companies like Starbucks, Univision, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and dozens more.

We also manage the The Voting Information Project, which coordinates with state election offices to publish nationally-standardized information about where and how to vote—data that powers everything from Google’s polling place search to our own text message and email reminders to TurboVote users, and received over 120 million impressions in 2016. Ballot Scout helps election administrators track absentee ballots through the mail, providing transparency in the vote-by-mail process and making it easier to follow up when things go awry. And in 2018, we became the organizational home of the National Association of State Election Directors(NASED).

Software development at Democracy Works

These products are the work of our 14-developer team. Most of our development involves writing microservices in Clojure running in Docker containers on Kubernetes and hosted on AWS. These services communicate over RabbitMQ and store their data in Datomic. Our users primarily interact with web apps written in ClojureScript and re-frame. We also have projects that use JavaScript, Node, React, Python, and PostgreSQL.

We pair program, collaborate with product managers, and make sure our efforts deliver value to voters. We define specialized roles and projects on each team so that everyone gets a variety of experience and working relationships and can bring their unique strengths to as wide a swath of our work as possible.

Where you fit in

As an Engineering Manager, you’ll be supporting and contributing with the Election Administration team at Democracy Works as they build the technology behind The Voting Information Project, Ballot Scout, and other systems that expand the capabilities of the people who run elections.

You will:

• Ensure that every member of the Election Administration engineering team has solid management and leadership, not just from a technology perspective but also as valued, growing employees of Democracy Works.
• Coordinate with the product and technical leads to ensure that we reliably and sustainably ship high quality software
• Represent the team in planning meetings
• Have regular one on ones with your team to set expectations, give feedback, provide context, support growth, and meet their needs as individuals within Democracy Works
• Work alongside the Election Administration engineering team to deliver features and fix bugs
• Run the hiring and onboarding process for new software developers
• Communicate directly with the VP Engineering, individual developers, and product leads to understand and support their needs and goals

You are:

• Empathetic, comfortable acting as your team’s biggest advocate
• Capable working with a distributed team across multiple time zones
• Curious
• Adept at bringing people to consensus, but willing to make decisions when the time comes
• A skilled communicator
• A reliable and enthusiastic coach

You have experience:

• Leading an engineering team, either as an engineering manager or as a technical lead
• Building and deploying complex products, sometimes multiple products simultaneously
• Learning and using a wide range of technologies and tools

Physical demands:
This position requires regular, daily use of a computer.

To apply, send a resume and brief, informal introduction to Chris using the form below. Please include how you found this job listing. We also encourage all applicants to state their pronouns when applying for any job opening at Democracy Works. From there, we’ll send you a short practical exercise designed to test some of your problem-solving skills, which we’ll anonymize and then evaluate in a blind review. Candidates with strong responses to the practical exercise will go through interview rounds (up to three) with different members of our team who interact closely with this position. We’ll ask for references from our top finalist(s), then make an offer.

Democracy Works is committed to diversity and inclusion in everything we do and aspires to have a team that’s representative of the voters we serve. When hiring, we practice proactive outreach to top talent that’s underrepresented in our sector (including Latino, Black, AAPI, and Indigenous candidates). We conduct an anonymized skills evaluation, to reduce implicit bias and resume-dependency in our process. We’re a woman- and gay-founded nonprofit, and promote an inclusive culture that stands against racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (to name a few). To be explicit, we strongly encourage applicants of all races, ethnicities, political party associations, religions (or lack thereof), national origins, sexual orientations, genders, sexes, ages, abilities, and branches of military service.

Feel free to contact [email protected] if you have any questions about our commitment to inclusion or about general hiring practices, or if you need an accommodation for a medical condition during the hiring process. Democracy Works posts all current career opportunities at democracy.works/careers.