Software Engineer, Geospatial Data

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Alabama, +24 more states.

📋 Description

• Collaborate with fellow engineers in the design, development, and upkeep of Civitech's applications and infrastructure.

• Work cross-functionally with product, research, and data science teams to create features from initial requirements through testing and documentation.

• Develop scalable, secure, and high-performance features within a cloud environment.

• Engage effectively with team members and promote an open and inclusive engineering culture.

• Enhance your technical abilities and contribute to effective team development practices.

• If you were part of our team today, you would be:

• Optimizing data accessibility: Creating new features to automatically make election research data available through our customer-facing tools, minimizing latency for our end users.

• Building data pipelines: Developing and maintaining pipelines that ingest, normalize, and deliver civic data to ensure reliable availability for our tools and customers, including geospatial data such as shapefiles and political boundary files.

• Bridging data silos: Crafting strategies to effectively and extensively share data between operational PostgreSQL databases and BigQuery data warehouses to enrich existing datasets.

• Working with political geography: Reconciling census shapes with political shapes (precincts, council districts, legislative districts) while ensuring the data remains current as new maps are processed through legislatures and courts.

• Enhancing data quality: Identifying and rectifying poor data quality—ranging from malformed geometries to inconsistent identifiers—so that downstream tools and customers receive dependable outcomes.

⛳️ Requirements

• You possess 3–5 years of experience in software engineering.

• You flourish in a dynamic startup atmosphere, enjoy developing software for the public good, and are passionate about democracy, civics, and politics.

• You have a strong proficiency in Python, particularly for data pipelines, scripting, and automation.

• You are comfortable working across the technology stack and are willing to adopt other languages and frameworks as necessary—our applications are primarily built in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript/TypeScript.

• You have experience in cloud environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform or AWS; familiarity with Azure is also advantageous.

• You excel in facilitating collaboration between engineers and partner teams.

• You are adept at identifying issues and assisting in the development of solutions, including diagnosing and resolving data quality problems.

• You actively engage in planning the team's work through backlog refinement, contributing to writing user stories, etc.

• You are skilled in written and verbal communication that makes complex code understandable.

• You prioritize writing maintainable and well-documented code.

• You demonstrate the capacity to give and receive constructive feedback effectively, particularly with fellow engineers.

• Additional qualifications (some but not all are needed): Our current work benefits from the following, but keep in mind you do not need to have expertise in all areas to be the ideal candidate for this position.

• Specialty: Geospatial & Political Data: This role emphasizes geospatial and political data, so experience in any of the following is a significant plus:

• Practical experience with geospatial data—shapefiles, GeoJSON, projections/coordinate systems, and spatial joins.

• Familiarity with geospatial libraries and tools (PostGIS, GeoPandas, Shapely, GDAL/OGR, Fiona, etc.).

• Understanding of political geography: precincts, city council and county districts, and state/federal legislative districts.

• Knowledge of how census geographies differ from political boundaries, along with the challenges of mapping between them.

• Awareness of the current redistricting landscape and how court-ordered and legislative map changes impact downstream data.

• Domain Knowledge: Insight into U.S. elections administration and/or campaign operations.

• Engineering Expertise: Proficiency in Python for scripting, automation, or data-related tasks.

• Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript (utilized within and outside of Rails).

• Familiarity with building and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications, including performing upgrades, using GraphQL-Ruby, Turbo/Stimulus, Rspec, etc.

• Understanding of API design, development, and usage, particularly GraphQL APIs.

• Experience contributing to automated test suites and ensuring comprehensive coverage.

• Systems and Data: Expertise in PostgreSQL (with PostGIS for geospatial data).

• Experience working with cloud data warehouses, especially BigQuery.

• Knowledge of constructing scalable data pipelines using dbt.

• Familiarity with scaling and high-availability techniques.

• Infrastructure: Experience maintaining infrastructure hosted on AWS or GCP.

• Experience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools, particularly GitLab CI and/or GitHub Actions.

• Familiarity with Terraform for Infrastructure-as-Code.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical, Vision, & Dental Insurance

• 401(k) plan

• Employee Stock Options

• Employer-paid Life Insurance

• Short/Long Term Disability Insurance

• Flexible Time Off & Paid Company Holidays

• Flexible Spending Account

• Parental Leave

• Flexible Schedules

• Professional Development Stipend

• Monthly Office Upkeep Stipend