Staff Software Engineer

Company: Murmuration
Location: United States (Full-time, Salaried)
Starting Salary: $225,324

Who We Are:

Murmuration is a mission-driven organization dedicated to strengthening communities by building technology that fosters civic engagement and empowers local action. We believe in redesigning systems and structures for a more just, equitable, and resilient America. Our team is a collaborative, curious, and creative group of professionals united by a shared commitment to positive social impact.

About the Position:

We are seeking a highly experienced Staff Software Engineer to join our Explorer Team. In this critical role, you will contribute to building a new product from the ground up while significantly raising the bar for engineering practices across our organization. You will help evolve Explorer, a data visualization product featuring interactive maps, charts, and an NLP-powered search, from its pilot phase to general availability.

This is an opportunity for a deeply experienced individual contributor to shape the technical future of a key product, establish engineering patterns, and mentor other engineers. You will thrive in a near-greenfield environment where product priorities can shift rapidly, and your technical judgment will be highly valued.

What You’ll Do:

Drive to General Availability:

• Shape Explorer’s technical direction, advising on priorities, dependencies, and proposing well-reasoned solutions.
• Transition a pilot implementation to a scalable, production-ready platform, making key architectural decisions.
• Harden systems for production readiness, focusing on reliability, performance, observability, and operational excellence.
• Architect for the long term, designing systems with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as core concerns.
• Improve and expand the codebase, reinforcing secure coding practices and prioritizing data privacy and access control.
• Drive test strategy, proactively identify technical risks, and enhance team-level quality.
• Reduce technical debt and contribute to organizational objectives.

Elevate the Team:

• Resolve ambiguity and bring structure to evolving requirements.
• Establish and advocate for best practices in test strategy, code quality, and system design.
• Mentor senior engineers and aspiring technical leads, fostering their judgment, ownership, and skills.
• Lead technical discussions, drive design consensus, and model high standards.
• Embody a culture of kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability.

Lead Beyond Explorer:

• Set technical direction across multiple teams, owning objectives that align with organizational goals.
• Lead significant cross-team initiatives, aligning technical and non-technical stakeholders and representing engineering.
• Champion secure coding practices, data privacy, and access control organization-wide.
• Organize and lead incident response, including post-incident reviews and remediation.

Technical Depth and Judgement:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated full-stack fluency.
• Experience taking a product from beta to general availability.
• Expertise in event-driven and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Ability to reason across OLAP and OLTP data architectures.
• Comfort making sound decisions with imperfect information.
• Strong debugging skills across the entire stack.
• Proactive approach to technical quality, identifying and prioritizing technical debt.

Data Expertise:

• Solid foundation in relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and fluent SQL.
• Experience with analytical or columnar datastores (e.g., Apache Pinot, ClickHouse, BigQuery).
• Experience with modern data warehousing and transformation using Snowflake and dbt.
• Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools (e.g., Dagster, Airflow).
• Working knowledge of time series data modeling.
• Experience with caching layers like Redis.

Infrastructure and Observability:

• Deep experience with cloud-native architectures and distributed systems, particularly on AWS.
• Proficiency with Docker and build tools.
• Direct experience with observability tooling (logging, metrics, tracing) such as Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana.

Security:

• Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control in production systems.

Emerging and Specialized Skills:

• Hands-on experience integrating LLM or AI APIs (e.g., OpenAI) into production applications.
• Experience with geospatial or map-based data visualization and related JavaScript libraries.

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.

Location and Compensation:

• This is a full-time, salaried position open to candidates anywhere in the United States.
• The starting salary for this position is $225,324.
• A comprehensive benefits package is included.

Our Culture of Care:

We are committed to fostering a culture of care that supports our staff in leading happy, healthy, and balanced lives. Our benefits package includes health, vision, and dental insurance with 100% of premiums covered for you and qualifying family members.