Head of Engineering
Remote
Technology /
Remote
The DNC Tech Team
In its continuing mission to build infrastructure to help Democrats win campaigns up and down the ballot, the Democratic National Committee's Tech Team is seeking an empathetic, collaborative engineering leader to guide the team in the run up to the 2024 elections. Our BigQuery data warehouse, early voting data pipelines, voter protection software, and security infrastructure were vital in winning countless elections in 2020 and 2022. As we look to the future, we're excited to build on this foundation and seek a Head of Engineering who will mentor our engineering managers, advise our tech leads, and work with product, data, and security peers on the joint future vision of our work.
Who We Are
We are a fully remote, distributed team living in 23 states and from a variety of backgrounds. Some of us have worked in political campaigns, others in public sector tech, and others in industry. We value diversity in perspective, lived experience, and the many paths one may take towards becoming a software engineer. We believe deeply in the promise of breaking the boom-bust cycle of political tech work and building technology infrastructure that will support campaigns from cycle to cycle and will improve with every iteration.
In this position you will..
- Craft the long term vision for our platforms and infrastructure with a core group of staff engineers and engineering managers.
- Work closely with your team and our CTO to foster an inclusive and diverse engineering team, which prioritizes developing careers, building a healthy and collaborative culture across engineering, product managers, and data science teams, and running a hiring process valuing diversity of background and experience
- Partner with our product, data, and security leads to shape an effective road map framework that delivers the maximum value for our users in line with our vision, and empower our teams to make strategic decisions balancing user research, technical needs and emergent opportunities
- Bring a security-first mindset to how we build and support products, including strategies around technical debt management, logging and alerting systems, and minimizing attack surface
- Be a senior technical partner to other teams outside of DNC Tech, providing consultative support and advice and help make build-buy-consult decisions on a dynamic range of projects
- Drive improvements on our existing processes ranging from tech design to code review to incident response and vendor management to deliver the high quality software projects with an eye towards efficiency, security, and iterability.
What we will look for…
- Multiple years of experience managing engineering teams, including managing and mentoring other managers, and guiding groups through periods of strategic and technical change
- A demonstrable track record of partnering closely with product, data science/analytics, and non-technical stakeholders in data-driven, cross-functional, and fast-paced collaborative teams
- Experience in modern scaled or cloud-based technology environments, including taking ownership of legacy projects and guiding effective decisions on refactoring technical platforms, or rewriting where appropriate. Thought partnership on systems design and architectural choices with engineers and tech leads is a common aspect of the role!
- An ability to rapidly build trust across multiple audiences and teams, providing clear and actionable feedback to peers, direct reports, and partners
- A commitment to championing diversity and inclusion within software engineering as exhibited by a concrete history of guiding and enriching the careers of your direct reports
- Experience driving large-scale strategic and tactical thinking towards developing and launching major initiatives with a focus on driving clarity and decisiveness across multiple teams
What we would be excited to see…
- A background in politics is helpful, but not essential. If you're coming from the tech industry, having experience as a volunteer and having end-user familiarity with the tools that campaigns use will be a boost for your onboarding, but we've also had people thrive here who were completely new to political tech
- Recent hands-on coding experience is similarly helpful but not essential. We have a strong group of staff engineers and tech leads who would welcome a peer to exchange ideas with, but this role is, first and foremost, a strategic people manager
- Experience working with Google Cloud Platform and/or Amazon Web Services, including helping teams think through infrastructure decisions and work in multiple cloud platforms
- Experience with application security training for engineers. We not only take security seriously, but model it publicly for a broad ecosystem of progressive data teams.
This position is not eligible for overtime wages, and is a supervisory position.
This position requires up to 15% of travel both in the Washington, D.C. area and across the country to attend and support meetings and events.
Benefits:
The DNC offers a generous benefit package, including:
- More than 30 days of paid time off, including Federal holidays, open leave, and personal days;
- Health and dental insurance for employee and dependents;
- 90% paid by the DNC, 10% paid by employee;
- Supplementary vision plans available to employees for purchase;
- Pre-tax Flexible spending account benefits available to employees and dependents.
