Senior Data Engineer, Elections

Change.org is searching for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Elections Team and help build and scale innovative local election experiences and tools that empower voters throughout the 2025/2026 election cycle. 

We’re a social impact business (a public benefit company), and the world's largest social change platform with 100 million users, 40,000+ campaigns launched on the site every month, and a 100% user-generated revenue model. Our users win campaigns for change once every hour. We’re working for a world where no one is powerless, and where creating change is a part of everyday life. We’re just getting started and hope you’ll join us!

From mobilizing over 5 million people to investigate the fires in the Amazon, to mobilizing nearly 3 million against war and famine in Yemen, to large-scale mobilizations for the people of Iran and against the war in Ukraine, and calling for Racial Justice in the US, many movements were born on Change.org. Dozens of local, national, and international victories are happening every day thanks to the strength of our members who are changing the lives of people around the world. We want to help them go even further and we need your help! 

The successful functioning of democracy relies on informed citizens, yet many voters lack the information they need to make educated decisions in local elections, leaving them to vote uninformed or abstain from voting altogether. Over the next 6-9 months we endeavor to answer the following questions:

• How might we educate voters with a best-in-class mobile-first voting experience?
• How might we build tools for supervoters & endorsers to help inform fellow citizens?
• How might we engage candidates to interact with their potential constituents?

Key Outcomes: 

• Product Delivery: Participate in all stages of data product development: opportunity assessment, ideation, discovery, validation, solutioning and definition, building, measuring, scaling. Be able to discuss trade-offs.
  
• Architecture & Technical Leadership: Ability to deliver on tactical approaches individually as well as strategic approaches with tech leaders. Can implement tooling and addresses tech debt. Advises on appropriate use of available technology.
  
• User Obsession: Cognizant of the needs of internal and external users in regards to product usage and are able to input on decisions based on that knowledge. Collaborate with PM and UX or relevant stakeholders to improve user experience.
  
  
• Build and manage robust data pipelines that unify information from third-party civic data providers, scraped sources, and internal editorial overrides into a clean, authoritative dataset.
  
  
• Design and evolve the data models that support fast, accurate lookups of candidate, race, and ballot-level information based on geographic and jurisdictional context.
  
  
• Own data reliability and integrity, including monitoring and reconciliation strategies to detect inconsistencies across sources or ingest failures.
  
  
• Collaborate cross-functionally to expose the right data to frontend and API consumers, ensuring alignment on structure, semantics, and update cadence.
• An ideal candidate has worked in an environment where they can cross collaborate while being an evangelist to maintaining data standards and availability.
  
  
• Continuously improve our data workflows, tooling, and documentation so that other engineers, analysts, and editors can work with confidence and ease.
  
• This job is expected to participate in our on call rotation 

The most important core competencies for the role are: 

Data Engineering Expertise:

• Experienced in designing and operating ETL/ELT pipelines, especially those that merge overlapping or conflicting data from multiple origins.
• Strong familiarity with relational databases, especially PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, and data normalization.
• Comfortable working within an environment using Nest.js, Prisma, and GraphQL
• Proficient in creating repeatable, testable, and observable data flows

Technical Collaboration:

• Partner effectively with other engineers to define data contracts and APIs that are resilient to change and scale with the platform.
• Participate in design reviews and documentation efforts, helping to guide thoughtful architectural decisions across the team.
• Work closely with analysts and content editors to understand edge cases and override scenarios, and reflect them accurately in the system. 
• Work as an embedded data engineering resource into the elections product team , closely collaborating with the Data & AI team and architect. 

Planning & Execution:

• Capable of decomposing large, ambiguous data projects into manageable chunks with clear owners, timelines, and success criteria.
• Proactive in identifying technical risks, tracking dependencies, and adapting implementation plans as needed.
• Prioritize reliability and scalability, ensuring the system performs under real-world loads and content diversity.

Target experience: 

• 6 + years of professional experience in data engineering or backend infrastructure roles.
• Architect: Understand administration of Cloud Data Platforms, Data Lake Technologies (AWS - S3/Kinesis/lambda/Glue/Spectrum/Redshift), and experience with ML/AI and Data Science platforms ( Nice to have) 
• Data Engineering:  6+ Hands-on experience working with near real time streaming, ETL/ELT for distributed columnar data stores.
• RDS: 5+ years of hands-on experience with relational databases PostgreSQL, schema on read/write and backend data warehouses in production environments.
• Language and Framework Knowledge: Skilled in some of the open source languages and frameworks used at Change.org, including Node.js
• Experience managing multi-source data pipelines, including conflict resolution, data validation, data quality and update coordination.
• AI: Experience working with LLMs, civic data APIs, or internal content moderation/override tools.

Interested? Great! Here's what you should know:

This is a full time role, and we are open to folks in the United States or Canada. 

We’re currently able to hire staff based in the following US locations: Alaska (AK), Arizona (AZ), California (CA), Connecticut (CT), District of Columbia (DC), Florida (FL), Georgia (GA), Illinois (IL), Iowa (IA), Kansas (KS), Maryland (MD), Massachusetts (MA), Minnesota (MN), Missouri (MO), New Jersey (NJ), New York (NY), North Carolina (NC), Oregon (OR), Pennsylvania (PA), Rhode Island (RI), Texas (TX), Vermont (VT), Virginia (VA), Washington (WA), Wisconsin (WI). We're also able to hire staff in Canada (AB, BC, ON).

Our compensation philosophy is based on pay equity. All of our salaries are determined before we launch a role – they are based on a predetermined salary scale, the level on that scale and the cost of labor for that location. The annual salary of a Senior Data Engineer is $200,000 USD in SF/NYC, $190,000 USD in Austin, Boston, LA, Seattle and $170,000 USD in all other US locations. 

Benefits and perks also vary based on location. 

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting amazing candidates like you, so please don’t hesitate to apply—we’d love to meet you. We also know it’s rare for someone to meet 100% of the qualifications. Please apply anyway!

We actively encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to apply. At Change.org, we are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We invest in programs to support our diverse workforce, offer inclusive onboarding experiences and affinity groups, celebrate the heritage of our staff, provide training on working across differences, and maintain fair and transparent salary scales. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or culture.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for candidates with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

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