Vote.org is looking for a software engineer to help permanently increase voter turnout in America.
If you’re both talented and pragmatic; if you love clean and well documented code; if you want to write software that solves actual, real world problems; and if you want to have an immediate and lasting impact on US elections, then this might be the job for you.
You describe yourself as someone who:
- Loves the idea of working at a highly effective, mission-driven nonprofit organization
- Finds the idea of a non-negotiable, hard deadlines exciting
- Is comfortable working remotely since we’re an all-remote team
- Ships working software as quickly as possible without sacrificing stability, privacy, or security
- Communicates pragmatic solutions clearly and can understand where engineering tasks fit within the big picture
- Prefers to do load testing and capacity planning over firefighting
- Considers user accessibility and 508 compliance a requirement and not a “nice to have”
- Asks questions, seeks answers, and is constantly working towards mastery of the tools and technologies you use
You’ll bring the following skills and experiences to Vote.org:
- 4+ years full-time professional experience building user facing web applications
- Fluency in a dynamic scripting language such as Python or Ruby
- Fluency in HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript
- Experience working with internal and external APIs
- Experience working with both traditional relational and document based databases
- Experience working with AWS or GCP
- Able to break down complex system requirements into discrete shippable features
You have some of the following bonus skills:
The chances are slim that you'll have all of these skills, but we expect that you'll bring 2-3 to our team, and potentially more.
- Knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes (mega bonus!)
- Experience with Python (mega bonus!)
- Experience with Python packaging software (PyPI, setuptools/distutils, etc)
- Experience with unit testing in Python and JavaScript.
- Familiarity with PEP8
- Experience with Tornado
- Experience with ElasticSearch, including field mapping and clustering/sharding
- Experience with React
- Experience building software from scratch
- Experience with GitHub, forking, and issue tracking.
- Experience scraping websites for data, working with malformed data, and generally righting the crimes against data committed by the people who publish very important information (such as US election data)
- Experience with advocacy or campaign work (including, but not limited to, political campaigns)
- Experience working for a mission-driven organization
- Experience building accessible software and testing for accessibility
- Knowledge of SEO best practices
- Mastery of the shell and the Linux environment
- An abiding love for the emerging US Web Design Standards (https://playbook.cio.gov/designstandards/)
- A preferential, agreeable, and favorable view of the Oxford comma
Salary:
- We pay a competitive salary based on a combination of your experience and your location. We promise you’ll be comfortably middle class, although you’re unlikely to get rich helping to fix democracy.
About Vote.org
Who we are:
- Vote.org is a YC-backed non-profit that uses technology to simplify political engagement, increase voter turnout, and strengthen American democracy. And this isn’t just talk: the only groups that reached more voters than we did in 2016 were the presidential campaigns themselves, and they spent 10.2 billion more dollars (literally) than we did.
- In 2016 alone we helped over 2.2 million people register to vote, check their registration status, or get their absentee ballots; we ran the single largest Election Day GOTV drive in the country; we pioneered the use of electronic signatures on voting forms; we served over 6.5 million visitors to our primary domain; we ran five of the largest controlled experiments in US voting history; and LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, and Stephen Curry made a PSA about us. Also, if you ask Siri how to vote, she’ll send you to Vote.org.
- We’re ambitious, efficient, metric-driven, passionate, low-ego, and fun to work with. (And our slack channels are awesome.)
Some of the benefits of working for Vote.org:
- Work from home. Live and work wherever you’d like. We all work from home and it’s just the best.
- Flexible work schedule. Need to take 3-5pm off every day to hang out with your kids after school? No problem.
- Excellent health benefits. Fully covered health, dental and vision for the employee, and generous coverage for spouse/children.
- Generous time off. 3-5 weeks of vacation, a mess of paid vacation days, and we all take the week between Christmas and New Years off.
- Retirement accounts. We offer both a 401(k) and a Roth 401(k) since we want you to retire one day.
- Awesome slack channels. Including #pets, #politics, and #OMG-WTF-LOL.