Arena Careers

Are you a motivated, mission-driven software engineer? Do you want to see progressive candidates actually achieve power? If so, the Democratic Data Exchange (DDx) may be the place for you.

DDx’s API Team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help build the data-sharing API infrastructure that enables progressive political campaigns to run more competitive, streamlined operations.

As a Senior or Staff Engineer on a small-but-mighty team, you will work hands-on with code, own and architect key portions of the product, and support the professional development of other team members. You will work closely with all of DDx, including advising engineering and product leadership on technical strategy.

This role reports to the API Team’s Engineering Manager, and would work closely with the VP of Engineering and Senior Product Manager.

Job candidates do not always meet 100% of the preferred qualifications. If much of this job description resonates with you, we encourage you to apply!

What You’ll Work On

• Core APIs and Frontends: build DDx’s core suite of APIs and their admin tools used for easy data exchange between campaigns and their technology partners

• Infrastructure: manage cloud resources (GCP), CI/CD pipelines, and deployment tooling

• Reliability and observability: own the health of what we ship, from monitoring and alerting to incident response and postmortems

• Architecture: participate in design decisions, write spikes and technical proposals, and help shape the platform's evolution

• Code review and verification: review code (whether written by humans or AI) and build the automated checks, tests, and monitoring that let the team ship faster with confidence

• Process improvement: refine and iterate on the software engineering processes themselves

• AI and automation: explore how AI agents and LLM-powered interfaces can change the way our clients interact with data and the way we build software

• Mentorship: help other engineers on the team grow, improve, and learn from your experience

You won't be siloed into one layer. We value engineers who move fluidly between data, backend, frontend, and infrastructure work to ship end-to-end. You'll also help us grow the team by participating in interviewing and evaluating engineering candidates.

What We're Looking For

Core competencies

• Mission-driven: you genuinely care about helping Progressives win elections, and about the people doing that work

• Leadership: as a senior member of the team, you will help set the cultural tone with collegiality, communication, and ownership

• Generalist mindset: you're energized by picking up new things rather than doing so under duress. You see unfamiliar tech as an opportunity, not an obstacle

• Bias toward action: you move fast, ship with quality, and don't wait for perfect conditions to make progress

• Autonomy: you can drive work independently with minimal guidance

• Teamwork: you help others and ask for help, align with stakeholders, and mentor teammates

• Shipping experience: you've led or significantly contributed to production systems with an emphasis on testing, code review, documentation, collaborating well with teammates, and owning what you ship

• API expertise: you have a track record of building and scaling APIs that have stood up under significant growth

• Cloud experience: you've managed deployments and infrastructure in cloud environments. We primarily use GCP, but equivalent experience is great too

• Strong communication: you write clearly, document your work, and actively listen to colleagues

• AI fluency: you're already using AI tools in your engineering workflow and are excited about how AI can help us build and operate better software. We're actively investing in AI-augmented development and want engineers who lean into that

Nice to have

• Personal projects you're excited to talk about

• Experience with political data, campaigns, or progressive organizations

• Experience across multiple layers of the stack or domains of work (data stores, deployment, operations, APIs, frontend)

• Experience integrating AI tools into established codebases and workflows, especially ones with real history and complexity behind them

• Familiarity with our existing stack

Existing Stack

• C# / .NET

• React.js

• PostgreSQL

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP), particularly:

  • CloudRun

  • Cloud Functions

  • Pub/Sub

  • BigQuery

• ClickHouse

• GitHub Actions

• Docker

• Terraform

• Firebase

Salary and Benefits

DDx offers a competitive compensation salary and benefits package, including:

• Company-paid healthcare, dental, and vision insurance for full-time employees

• Matching 401(k) contributions up to 3%

• Unlimited paid time off (PTO) policy

• 16 weeks of paid leave for new parents

• Other perks such as a generous holiday schedule and monthly team wellness days

The salary range for Staff Software Engineer is $160,00 to $175,000.

Location

• Remote position; anywhere in the U.S. DDx is a remote-first organization.

Additional Requirements

• You must be authorized to work in the U.S. without restriction

• You'll serve on the engineering on-call rotation. Shifts are scheduled in advance and may require availability outside standard hours, particularly during election seasons

• This role may require up to ~10% travel for team retreats and collaborative opportunities

Physical Demands

The physical demands here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions:

• Ability to sit at a computer monitor for extended periods of time.

• Ability to lift up to 20 pounds occasionally.

About Us

Founded in 2019, the Democratic Data Exchange (DDx) is a for-profit company that aims to expand the possibilities of what data can accomplish by ensuring the accessibility and availability of high-quality, trusted data across the ecosystem.

DDx is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.