Staff Engineer

WHO WE ARE

ActBlue is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating cutting-edge technology that fuels Democratic victories and enables progressive causes to thrive. 

Our vision is simple: building change through the power of people. Since our founding, we’ve been building innovative solutions to revolutionize grassroots fundraising – if you’ve donated to a Democratic campaign or a progressive organization online, you’ve probably used our platform! We believe in putting power in the hands of small-dollar donors by helping thousands of groups — from local candidates to national movements — mobilize their communities and create a lasting impact. Every member of our team is deeply committed to advancing our shared mission and core values. Together, we are shaping the future of democracy. 

THE OPPORTUNITY

As a Staff Engineer, you will be a leading technical expert on a team that is building and evolving a new strategic platform. You'll provide technical leadership for multi-quarter initiatives involving complex requirements and strategic thinking, working collaboratively with engineers to plan and execute while playing a key role in defining the team's tech strategy and roadmap. Working full-stack with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, React, and TypeScript, you'll architect systems and establish technical foundations that enable sophisticated user-facing features. Your work will directly impact thousands of users who depend on reliable, accurate, and performant systems.

Our engineering and product organization is made up of empathetic and passionate people. We're organized into cross-functional teams that operate independently in alignment with the broader organizational goals.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Work with your team to architect, refactor, and improve donor and entity user experiences.
• 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.
• Partner with designers and product managers to help shape the team's roadmap, anticipating important information needs from stakeholders to inform project work and proactively raising potential competing product interests.
• Serve as a technical consultant and go-to resource for engineers across teams on complex architectural decisions, system design, and best practices.
• Collaboratively develop and champion best practices and design patterns to improve the maintainability of the platform.
• Demonstrate technical leadership through writing documentation, establishing effective testing and monitoring, and fostering clear and audience-oriented communication.
• Coach and mentor multiple members of the team, creating professional development opportunities and fostering a culture of seeking feedback as a tool for growth.
• Create spaces for individuals to be engaged, valued, and heard, setting examples and cultural expectations around inclusivity within the team.
• Receive support from your manager to grow as an individual and increase your impact on the success of your team and the progressive movement.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 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.
• Broad understanding of a spectrum of stacks; expert understanding of dependencies, needs, impacts, and risks across technical areas within a domain.
• Professional experience working with React and TypeScript to develop frontend features from design and discovery through to deployment and monitoring.
• Professional experience working with Ruby on Rails to make changes to APIs in order to carry a feature to completion.
• Deep understanding of performance, scalability, and security best practices, with 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 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.
• Ability to assess technology and integrations in the context of multiple teams; recognized as an expert across teams for facilitating technical decision-making.
• Ability to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders and to collaboratively translate business requirements and strategic goals into technical solutions, modifying