Engineering Manager at Democracy Works

Engineering Manager

at Democracy Works

Brooklyn, NY or Remote within the US

Location: Brooklyn, NY or remote within the US

Salary Ranges: $111,575 – $149,622 (Offers will vary based on experience and location, based on cost-of-living calculations)

Seniority Level: Senior

Supervisory role: Yes

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

Organizational overview

At Democracy Works, we work to help Americans vote, no matter what. To that end, we build technology for both voters and election administrators to help increase voter access and voter turnout.

• TurboVote is a tool designed to help voters register, request their ballot, and make their voice heard in every election, from local to national. We’ve connected over ten million Americans with TurboVote by building the largest college, nonprofit, and corporate voter engagement coalition in the country, including more than 300 campuses, nonprofits – like Headcount, Color of Change, and the Hispanic Federation – and companies like Starbucks, Univision, Facebook, Google, and Snap.
• As the only comprehensive official election dataset, the Voting Information Project (VIP) helps Americans find their polling site and available ballot dropbox locations where they look for it most: online. Across Google products alone, our ballot dropbox and polling place data were viewed nearly 500 million times in 2020.
• How To Vote breaks down all the options each state offers for voting, their voter registration rules, as well as unique circumstances like voting overseas and voting rights restoration for the formerly incarcerated. Across Google products alone, our How to Vote guides were promoted over 2 billion times in 2020.
• Our tool Ballot Scout brings transparency and accountability to the vote-by-mail process by allowing elections administrators and voters to track every ballot with ease. 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.
• Co-founded by Democracy Works and the CAA Foundation, Civic Alliance is a nonpartisan group of businesses working together to build a future where everyone participates in shaping our democracy. In 2020, membership grew to 1,030 companies with an employee reach of 5,163,938.

We are currently seeking to hire an Engineering Manager for TurboVote.

Candidates joining our TurboVote team will collaborate with our Product and Voter Engagement Program teams to build and maintain software that helps voters register to vote, request their absentee ballot, and sign up for personalized election notifications. The technology underpinning TurboVote is a microservices architecture primarily written in Clojure, with opportunities to use other languages such as JavaScript. Services are deployed using containers (Docker) orchestrated by Kubernetes and running in the AWS cloud. Services primarily communicate using RabbitMQ and store their data in Datomic and PostgreSQL. If you don’t know Datomic, don’t worry – we’ll teach you. The web front-ends are written in ClojureScript + re-frame (a framework built atop React), with opportunities to use JavaScript and TypeScript.

As a leader of the team, you will:

• Be the champion of our processes we use to build our products: scope work, engage in planning, and review code written by others
• Foster collaborative and productive relationships with your team, Product Owner and stakeholders
• Operate and communicate effectively with a distributed team, using tools such as Slack and Zoom
• Give and get feedback to grow yourself and your team
• Participate in pair programming
• Participate in an on-call rotation for your team when you’re ready and have the resources to be successful (off-hours pages are rare and we take them seriously)
• Engage in conversations about anti-oppression and racial justice in our work

As a Engineering Manager, you will:

• Provide technical leadership as well as learning and growth opportunities for team members
• Ensure our processes and standards are adhered to and hold team members accountable for commitments and quality of work
• Be responsible for the team’s delivery of high-quality work while following best practices
• Participate in code reviews and pair programming as well as make individual code contributions from time to time
• Hold regular standups, retrospectives, and sprint planning meetings as well as facilitate demos with other teams or stakeholders.
• Hold regular one-on-one meetings to provide feedback, guidance, coaching, and mentoring with team members
• Participate in the hiring and onboarding process for new software engineers
• Implement large-scale technical architecture decisions that have a multi-year impact such as choices of new framework, language, or vendors
• Owns large-impact initiatives and the research and growth needed to achieve goals
• Serve as a subject-matter expert in the development/engineering space and a go-to resource for thought partnership

You are someone with:

• Strong English written communication skills
• An empathetic approach to leadership and is an active listener, understanding that software is created by and for people
• An ability to set and manage expectations
• An ability to hold themselves and team members accountable for quality of deliverables and commitments
• A high degree of self-awareness, understanding how their actions and decisions may impact individuals, team and the wider organization
• An ability to motivate individuals and teams to build consensus and provide direction
• An ability to communicate technical concepts to an audience with a variety of technical backgrounds
• Expertise in at least one functional programming language with a desire to learn Clojure/ClojureScript
• A desire to join a remote, distributed team
• Familiarity with a distributed version control system (such as Git or Mercurial)
• An ability to learn, make tradeoffs, and think critically about software systems
• Curiosity: you like exploring new tools, techniques, and perspectives on building software
• A commitment to being detail-oriented and thorough in your work
• Interest in supporting voters or working on problems facing election infrastructure in the United States
• A solid foundation in issues of racial justice, or beginning to learn more in earnest

You have experience:

• Leading an Engineering team with at least 4 members
• 2+ years of management experience
• 5+ years hands-on experience delivering projects using a functional, object-oriented or scripting programming language.
• 5+ years of experience working with relational databases and relational data modeling
• Experience working with service-oriented or microservices architectures
• Building, maintaining and deploying complex applications
• Balancing multiple priorities
• Helping teams gather and refine requirements

It’s a plus if:

• You’ve previously worked on a remote, distributed team
• You enjoy automating repetitive or manual tasks
• You have experience working with Amazon Web Services
• You have experience with or an understanding of accessibility in software development
• You have a knowledge of testing practices including test automation
• You have experience with and enjoy data modeling for complex data pipelines
• You have experience with or an understanding of geospatial databases or spatial relational database extensions

Physical demands

These positions require regular, daily use of a computer (including the use of G-Suite and Slack) to conduct work and communicate with colleagues. For those working out of our Brooklyn office, the F train stops closest to our office, but exiting the station requires the use of four flights of stairs. Our office has an elevator available at street level. Streets and buildings nearby are currently under construction, which can disrupt sidewalks and result in varying levels of construction noise audible from the office. Our offices share a set of gendered bathrooms with other offices on our floor.

Social expectations

You will have regular check-ins with the VP of Engineering and regular meetings with the Engineers and Product Managers you work with.

Time and travel expectations

DW’s regular operating hours are 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. Two times per year, all full-time staff members participate in a five-day retreat at our Brooklyn office. All Staff is held each year in May and November, when we are able to safely do so.

Application Instructions

To apply, please attach a resume and respond to the following questions (instead of a cover letter) using the form below.

In your responses, please include only the following information:

• What are your pronouns?
• How did you find this job listing?
• Why are you interested in this role and working at Democracy Works?
• Democracy Works values diversity in its teams. Why is it important to you to work on a diverse engineering team? How do you communicate a nonpartisan voice while balancing your passion for a cause?
• Describe your supervisory experience and management style. (Number of direct reports, team dynamic, etc.)
• How many combined years of experience do you have working on a software development team?
• Are you authorized to work lawfully in the United States for Democracy Works?

As part of our application, you’ll see an optional form used to collect EEOC demographic information. The data collected in this form is useful in our EEOC reporting and in our assessment of our recruitment practices. However, please keep in mind that the standardized EEOC language used in this form does not reflect the values of Democracy Works – for example, we don’t view gender as binary. We also encourage all applicants to state their pronouns when applying for any job opening at Democracy Works.

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. 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.

Democracy Works follows the I-9 requirements of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Immigration sponsorship is not available for this position, and you must possess your own work authorization in the U.S. now and in the future to continue working in this position.