This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer, Digital Democracy based in the United States.
This role is a senior technical leadership position focused on building and scaling advanced civic technology systems that make legislative data more accessible, transparent, and usable for the public. You will help design the core architecture behind large-scale data ingestion, processing, indexing, and search systems that power AI-driven civic insights. The work sits at the intersection of software engineering, data infrastructure, and public-interest technology, with a strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and search quality. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to evolve systems that transform complex government information into structured, searchable, and meaningful insights. This is a high-impact role where your engineering decisions directly contribute to civic transparency and democratic accountability across multiple U.S. states.
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer, Digital Democracy based in the United States.
This role is a senior technical leadership position focused on building and scaling advanced civic technology systems that make legislative data more accessible, transparent, and usable for the public. You will help design the core architecture behind large-scale data ingestion, processing, indexing, and search systems that power AI-driven civic insights. The work sits at the intersection of software engineering, data infrastructure, and public-interest technology, with a strong emphasis on reliability, scalability, and search quality. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to evolve systems that transform complex government information into structured, searchable, and meaningful insights. This is a high-impact role where your engineering decisions directly contribute to civic transparency and democratic accountability across multiple U.S. states.
Accountabilities:
- Design and evolve distributed systems that ingest, process, and normalize large volumes of legislative and government data from diverse sources.
- Build and optimize scalable data pipelines that transform raw civic data into structured, searchable, and analytics-ready formats.
- Develop and maintain robust APIs and backend infrastructure supporting public platforms, partner integrations, and AI-powered civic applications.
- Architect and improve search and retrieval systems, including relevance tuning, indexing strategies, and query optimization using Elasticsearch.
- Ensure high system reliability, performance, scalability, and observability across cloud-based production environments.
- Lead technical decision-making on system architecture, infrastructure design, and long-term platform evolution.
- Mentor and support engineering team members, contributing to technical growth and best practices.
- Collaborate with external partners to integrate third-party data sources and expand platform capabilities.
- Extensive experience in senior or Staff-level engineering roles within complex, data-intensive systems.
- Deep expertise in systems design, distributed architectures, and database design.
- Strong hands-on experience with Elasticsearch, including indexing, query optimization, relevance tuning, and scaling search systems in production.
- Proven ability to design and operate cloud-based infrastructure including caching, load balancing, queues, monitoring, and highly available systems.
- Strong programming experience with backend and data-focused systems (Python preferred).
- Experience building and maintaining APIs for internal, external, and public-facing use cases.
- Familiarity with modern data architectures and AI-enabled systems such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
- Experience working in small, fast-moving teams with broad technical ownership.
- Exposure to AWS, Cloudflare, MySQL, and related production technologies.
- Strong communication skills and ability to operate across technical and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Annual salary range of 140,000 to 150,000 USD
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance with high employer contribution
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Company-paid life insurance coverage
- Fully remote work within the United States, with occasional travel as needed
- Opportunity to work on high-impact civic technology used by millions of people
- Collaborative, mission-driven environment focused on transparency and public interest
- Strong engineering ownership and influence over core system architecture
- Work on advanced AI-driven search and data systems applied to real-world democracy infrastructure
Requirements:
Benefits: