Arena Careers

ABOUT SWING LEFT

Swing Left’s mission is simple: we make it easy for people to maximize their impact on the most competitive elections to help Democrats win. Since launching in 2017, Swing Left’s one million members have raised more than $140 million for Democratic candidates, civic organizations, and voter mobilization efforts, and engaged more than 50 million voters door-to-door, by phone, and through handwritten letters. What makes us different:

• Swing Left is singularly focused on directing grassroots time and money to help Democrats win close races that will determine the balance of power in our government, from the White House to key state houses.
• We use data and technology to increase volunteer and donor impact by driving the right resources to the right campaigns, at the right time.
• We put people first, delivering a member experience focused on strategic action, not noise—no spam emails, texts, or doomsday messaging.

ABOUT VOTE FORWARD

Vote Forward is a nonpartisan organization that helps grassroots volunteers turn out citizens from underrepresented communities and encourage active participation in our democracy through high-impact voter engagement tactics. Since 2018, more than 250,000 grassroots volunteers have used the Vote Forward platform to send handwritten letters to more than 40 million prospective voters to encourage them to register to vote and turn out for elections. Vote Forward is affiliated with Swing Left.

JOB SUMMARY

The engineering team designs, builds, and maintains the technical infrastructure that powers Swing Left and Vote Forward’s programs, ensuring our digital tools effectively support volunteer action and organizational goals. The Senior Director of Engineering leads this team in implementing software solutions across swingleft.org, votefwd.org, and related platforms—developing reliable, scalable code and managing integrations with grassroots organizing tools and data providers.

The Senior Director of Engineering collaborates closely with product, analytics, and program teams to drive the product development lifecycle, support experimentation, and continuously improve user experiences. This role also helps ensure that data infrastructure is sound, all in service of impactful, secure, and responsive program delivery.

• Oversee the creation of technical strategy and architecture for the organization’s engineering infrastructure, ensuring scalability, performance, and security.
• Develop proactive capacity and resourcing plans to support the organization’s current and future engineering needs, manage the hiring of new engineers, and onboard engineering contractors (where required) to supplement capacity.
• Foster a cohesive, healthy, and high-performing engineering team culture, including the adoption of best practices for the software development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with the product team on the product roadmap by understanding relevant internal and external technical needs and how to solve them with working, high-quality, scalable software that is aligned with organizational infrastructure.
• Lead the technical implementation of the product development lifecycle to ship high-quality, well-tested code; oversee prioritization of tactical backlogs and estimation of technical scopes of work for large projects.
• Act as the organization’s lead engineering representative for relationships with key partners, including those involved in Ground Truth.
• Proactively identify and mitigate technical and operational risks, including through continuous monitoring of health metrics and alerts for our platforms.
• Lead the technical aspect of organizational rapid-response efforts as needed.

REQUIREMENTS

We’re looking for a mission-driven engineering leader who has a strong foundation in software development and data analysis, with experience writing clean, testable code and managing modern web and data infrastructure. This person is a thoughtful problem solver, a curious learner, a pragmatic builder, and an experienced, empathetic leader of people and process who takes pride in delivering reliable products.

Role-Specific Competencies and Skills

• A strong interest in and alignment with the distinct missions and values of Swing Left and Vote Forward.
• At least eight years of experience in software engineering and development.
• At least five years of experience in an engineering management role.
• Experience supporting data analysis in close collaboration with data analysis or data science experts.
• Experience overseeing website development and maintenance using cloud services such as Google Cloud and AWS, web hosting platforms like Vercel and Heroku, and web frameworks such as React-Query and Next.js.
• Experience writing, reviewing, and debugging programs in multiple programming and scripting languages such as Javascript (Node.js), Python, and HTML.
• Experience creating and implementing sustainable processes for delivering usable, readable, and maintainable code with robust automated testing.
• Experience with database management, access, and operation using SQL (or similar languages).
• Experience with modern data engineering tools and frameworks such as Fivetran, Airbyte, Snowflake, DBT, Dagster, or Lightdash.
• Experience with tools and platforms that are commonly used within the progressive tech ecosystem (such as NGP VAN / EveryAction, ActionKit, and ActBlue) is a plus.
• Experience with using large language models to extract insights from unstructured datasets is a plus.

Essential Baseline Competencies

• Ability to lead a distributed team and collaborate effectively across functions in a virtual workplace.
• Excitement about joining and contributing to a culture rooted in impact, innovation, and ambition; comfort with ambitious goals, ambiguous requirements, and high expectations for performance.
• Commitment to equity and belonging across all identities, including but not limited to race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ability; ability to hear, reflect, act on, and learn from feedback related to identity and equity.

LOGISTICS

Hiring Process

• Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
• The priority deadline to apply is October 27.
• We are aiming for a December start date. This hiring process will include a take home skills test and two to three interviews, including a technical interview.
• We will communicate about our expected timeline as the process progresses, and all candidates will receive communication from our team regarding their application status.

Compensation

• The pay range is $135,000 - $140,000/year.

Benefits for Full-Time Employees Include

• Medical, dental and vision insurance: 100% of the premium paid for employees and 50% for dependents
• Health and dependent care FSA accounts
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance
• Retirement plan
• Professional development, remote work and technology stipends
• An unlimited time-off policy + a flexible medical and parental leave policy
• Our office is closed for approximately 25 business days each year (including federal holidays)

Location and Working Hours

• This position is a full-time, exempt, and remote position based in the United States. We are an entirely remote team with staff located across the country.
• We expect employees to be online for virtual meetings and asynchronous collaboration during normal business hours (including our core hours of noon to 5pm ET) and sometimes outside of these hours for peak/rapid response moments.
• Minimal travel is expected for this position, generally 1-2x/year for staff gatherings.

We are happy to answer any questions you have about our benefits and policies in interviews.

We are an equal-opportunity employer and seek applications from all qualified candidates who are eligible to work in the United States. However, we are not able to sponsor visas at this time. We use E-Verify during onboarding to complete the I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification. We welcome all applicants regardless of age, citizenship, gender identity or expression, national origin, pregnancy status, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other differences.