Staff Software Engineer, Extensibility and Integration

About ActBlue

ActBlue is a nonprofit dedicated to building technology and infrastructure for Democratic campaigns, progressive-aligned causes, and individuals striving to create lasting, people-powered change. Our online fundraising platform is utilized by thousands of groups, enabling them to build grassroots movements and empower small-dollar donors. Our vision is a democracy where everyone seeking to drive progressive change can effectively deploy their resources and creativity. Our team, comprising activists, tech innovators, and customer service professionals, is united by a strong commitment to our mission.

The Opportunity

ActBlue is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Extensibility and Integrations team. In this critical role, you will provide technical leadership for multi-quarter initiatives focused on digital fundraising. You will empower fundraising administrators to seamlessly integrate and manage contribution data across their various toolsets. Your contributions will be vital in developing an intuitive, self-managed suite of tools, enhancing our reporting and integration capabilities, and ensuring a smooth user experience for fundraising administrators on our platform.

You will work full-stack using Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, React, and TypeScript to architect systems and establish the technical foundations for sophisticated integrations and data exchange. Collaborating closely with product, design, and cross-functional teams, you will identify and implement key improvements to boost product performance, while also solidifying system reliability, scalability, and maintainability. Your innovative approach to extensible solutions will elevate ActBlue's data and reporting tools, meeting current user needs and preparing for future advancements. By joining us, you will play a crucial role in strengthening the technological infrastructure that supports progressive movements.

Our engineering and product organization consists of empathetic and passionate individuals, structured into independent, cross-functional teams that align with ActBlue's overarching goals.

What You Will Do

• Architect and lead database modernization efforts, optimizing large-scale systems for efficiency and reliability while safeguarding sensitive donor information through advanced data management and retention strategies.
• Lead the design and implementation of scalable data solutions and robust APIs, ensuring seamless data integration, high availability, and alignment with business goals for peak performance during critical fundraising moments.
• Lead the technical execution of large, cross-team initiatives, collaborating 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.
• Proactively tackle database performance, refining schemas and enhancing data retrieval processes while creating strategic integrations for vendor APIs for improved system interconnectivity.
• Serve as a technical consultant and go-to resource for engineers across teams on complex architectural decisions, system design, and best practices — particularly around extensibility, integrations, and data exchange.
• Advocate for comprehensive monitoring systems and software quality standards, implementing best practices that anticipate and accommodate future scalability and maintenance needs.
• Recognize the importance of addressing tech debt head-on. Your proactive approach will ensure our systems remain agile and adaptable, setting us up for future success.
• Demonstrate technical leadership through writing documentation, establishing effective testing and monitoring, and fostering clear and audience-oriented communication.
• Coach and mentor engineers on your team, creating professional development opportunities and partnering with engineering managers to find sponsorship and growth opportunities for your colleagues.
• Model effective feedback in code reviews, explaining the "why" in a way that's easily understood, and create spaces for individuals to be engaged, valued, and heard.

What You'll Be Working With

• Frontend Development: JavaScript and TypeScript with React.
• Backend Development: Ruby on Rails, with SQL via PostgreSQL for database management, Node.js.
• Data Management: REST and GraphQL for API queries, Sidekiq for background job processing.
• Development Tools: TypeScript for static type checking, Yarn + Webpack for managing dependencies and builds, ESLint/Prettier for code quality control.
• Infrastructure and Monitoring:
• Application Hosting: Heroku for deploying, Kubernetes for container orchestration.
• Monitoring and Error Tracking: Datadog for system monitoring, Bugsnag for error detection.
• Data Analytics and Reporting: Mixpanel for tracking user interactions, Looker for data analysis powered by SQL/PSQL for in-depth PostgreSQL querying.

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.
• Significant experience in developing and maintaining large monolithic server-side web applications, including making changes to APIs to carry features to completion.
• Broad understanding of a spectrum of stacks; expert understanding of dependencies, needs, impacts, and risks across technical areas within a domain. Our team focuses primarily on the back end, but a candidate for this role would ideally have experience with and an understanding of the entire technological ecosystem.
• Deep understanding of performance, scalability, and security best practices, with the 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 and integrating with third-party APIs and building extensible systems that support diverse downstream toolsets and data consumers.
• 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.
• A track record of effective collaboration with engineers to develop abstractions and patterns that make it easy to build reliable software.
• Eagerness to explore and refactor legacy code — we've been doing this for a while now and could use an engineer who brings an empathetic but forward-thinking approach to working in an older codebase.
• Ability to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders and to collaboratively translate business requirements and strategic goals into technical solutions, modifying communication style to fit the audience.
• Experience coaching engineers on coaching and mentoring others; fostering a culture of delivering specific praise and constructive feedback.
• Can provide support and stability during times of urgency; contributes holistic solutions in post-mortems.
• An inclusive, generous working style: you like to mentor, collaborate, and elevate your team by supporting your peers, providing coaching and guidance to multiple team members, and anticipating where your intervention would be helpful.

Work & Benefits Snapshot

This is a full-time, remote, salaried position. Limited travel may be required for all-staff and departmental retreats (1-2 times per year). Additional travel may be required for select positions.

Registered States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Washington D.C.

While ActBlue is registered to support remote work in the listed states, we can register in additional states as needed. If you are in a state not listed, your application may still be considered, but the offer process might take longer.

Work Schedule: This role requires availability during regular business hours (Mon-Fri) and includes an on-call rotation for non-traditional hours as needed.

Work Environment: Work with distributed teams across all U.S. time zones. Requires extended technology usage and proficiency with virtual communication tools (Zoom, Slack). Regular attendance in virtual meetings is expected.

Salary Range: $191,679 - $216,566 - $241,452. Final salary offers depend on candidate experience, interview performance, and current team salary parity.

Benefits

• Flexible work schedules and unlimited time off.
• Fully paid and trans-inclusive health, dental, and vision insurance for employees and families.
• Fully paid health reimbursement arrangement for out-of-pocket expenses.
• Fully paid short- and long-term disability insurance.
• Fully paid basic and AD&D life insurance, with a voluntary supplemental life insurance option.
• Dependent and health care flexible spending account options.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) benefits.
• Automatic 2% Employer-paid 401K contribution, plus up to a 6% match on employee contributions.
• A minimum of three months paid medical, family, and parental leave (for all new parents, including adoptions).
• Commuter or home-office benefits, including a $1,000 home-office setup allowance for new full-time remote employees.
• Additional perks: quarterly snack deliveries and digital subscriptions to the Boston Globe & New York Times.

ActBlue cannot sponsor work visas at this time.

UNION INFORMATION: This position is subject to a collective bargaining agreement with the Communications Workers of America.

ActBlue will never ask candidates to buy equipment or email from addresses other than actblue.com or actbluetech.com.

Key skills/competency

• Staff Software Engineer
• Extensibility and Integration
• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL
• React
• TypeScript
• API Design
• Database Modernization
• System Architecture
• Technical Leadership