Staff Software Engineer, Extensibility and Integration

ActBlue is a nonprofit that builds tech and infrastructure for Democratic campaigns and progressive causes. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for initiatives in digital fundraising, focusing on integrating and managing contribution data across various toolsets.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and lead database modernization efforts, optimizing large-scale systems for efficiency and reliability while safeguarding sensitive donor information through advanced data management and retention strategies
• Lead the design and implementation of scalable data solutions and robust APIs, ensuring seamless data integration, high availability, and alignment with business goals for peak performance during critical fundraising moments
• Lead the technical execution of large, cross-team initiatives, working with multiple engineers to design and implement solutions that balance high-impact opportunities with effort, scope, and technical tradeoffs
• Break down initiative-level work across multiple epics and contribute technical expertise to shape the team's roadmap prioritization
• Proactively tackle database performance, refining schemas and enhancing data retrieval processes while creating strategic integrations for vendor APIs for improved system interconnectivity
• Serve as a technical consultant and go-to resource for engineers across teams on complex architectural decisions, system design, and best practices — particularly around extensibility, integrations, and data exchange
• Advocate for comprehensive monitoring systems and software quality standards, implementing best practices that anticipate and accommodate future scalability and maintenance needs
• Recognize the importance of addressing tech debt head-on. Your proactive approach will ensure our systems remain agile and adaptable, setting us up for future success
• Demonstrate technical leadership through writing documentation, establishing effective testing and monitoring, and fostering clear and audience-oriented communication
• Coach and mentor engineers on your team, creating professional development opportunities and partnering with engineering managers to find sponsorship and growth opportunities for your colleagues
• Model effective feedback in code reviews, explaining the "why" in a way that's easily understood, and create spaces for individuals to be engaged, valued, and heard

Requirements:

• 6-8 years of relevant professional experience, with demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership for multi-quarter initiatives involving complex requirements, strategic thinking, and cross-team collaboration
• Significant experience in developing and maintaining large monolithic server-side web applications, including making changes to APIs to carry features to completion
• Broad understanding of a spectrum of stacks; expert understanding of dependencies, needs, impacts, and risks across technical areas within a domain. Our team focuses primarily on the back end, but a candidate for this role would ideally have experience with and an understanding of the entire technological ecosystem
• Deep understanding of performance, scalability, and security best practices, with the ability to recommend system-level improvements to mitigate concerns for broad systems. Known as a go-to consultant that engineers turn to for guidance in these areas
• Experience designing and integrating with third-party APIs and building extensible systems that support diverse downstream toolsets and data consumers
• Experience designing frameworks to enable a culture of defensive testing; consistently debugging the toughest issues throughout the stack regardless of environment, finding root cause or viable workarounds
• A track record of effective collaboration with engineers to develop abstractions and patterns that make it easy to build reliable software
• Eagerness to explore and refactor legacy code — we've been doing this for a while now and could use an engineer who brings an empathetic but forward-thinking approach to working in an older codebase
• Ability to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders and to collaboratively translate business requirements and strategic goals into technical solutions, modifying communication style to fit the audience
• Experience coaching engineers on coaching and mentoring others; fostering a culture of delivering specific praise and constructive feedback
• Can provide support and stability during times of urgency; contributes holistic solutions in post-mortems
• An inclusive, generous working style: you like to mentor, collaborate, and elevate your team by supporting your peers, providing coaching and guidance to multiple team members, and anticipating where your intervention would be helpful