Vote.org is hiring a Software Engineer to help us build the tools that will permanently increase voter turnout in the United States of America.

Company description

Vote.org is a nonprofit startup that uses technology to simplify political engagement, increase voter turnout, and strengthen American democracy. We believe that Americans want to vote and will vote in higher numbers — and more consistently — as voting becomes more convenient. We launched in April 2016, and have since helped millions of Americans register to vote and cast ballots through a combination of best-in-class technology and innovative outreach. Our work has the potential to impact the outcome of elections by bringing millions more voters to the voting booth.

Vote.org is deeply committed to diversity. We strongly encourage women, black, indigenous, and people of color, first-generation Americans, new parents, single parents, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community to apply.

Job Description

We are seeking a Software Engineer to join our product engineering team and contribute to the development of our tools that help millions of voters every year. You will report to the VP of Technology and collaborate with some or all of the other teams within the organization – Partnerships, Programs, Investments, Operations, and Communications.

This is a full-stack role and we are looking for applicants that have prior software engineering experience, but we recognize that experience can come in many forms. We encourage you to apply as long as you aspire to meet the expectations listed below, even if you haven’t had a formal opportunity to perform them.

This position will be fully remote.

 What You’ll Do: 

• Contribute to the development of our voter-facing tools, website, partner-facing tools, and internal tools.
• Ship high-quality code across the stack that is scalable, secure, and hopefully comes with tests.
• Drive the process of your work beginning from the initial specification and ending with deployment to production, collaborating with both technical and non-technical colleagues along the way.
• Ensure that production systems are always available and functioning properly. Our team all shares in a flexible on-call schedule that rotates weekly; typically, there is less than one incident per month.
• Contribute to the long-term success of our applications by improving existing infrastructure, documentation, automated testing, and processes, both technical and otherwise.

What we hope you’ll bring:

• Experience developing modern web applications. Most of our codebase uses Ruby on Rails and our static site uses Gatsby, a framework that includes React. If you don’t have specific experience with these frameworks, we hope you’re excited to learn them!
• Experience using the tools that aid the software development lifecycle: issue trackers, version control, peer review, CI/CD.
• Experience shipping code to a public-facing production environment where traffic is variable.
• Experience and desire to work cross-functionally.
• Ability to balance quality and maintainability with speed of execution.
• Ability to adjust to the shifting priorities that inherently accompany working in the voter engagement space.
• Willingness to take on tasks that may be outside of your area of expertise or to take ownership of projects that may fall outside of the traditional scope of software engineering.
• Empathy towards the experience of a voter using our tools or navigating our website.

Why join our team, and why now?

• We exist in service of a critical mission – and we’re just getting started. Our team does high impact, meaningful work every single day. Right now, our world often feels like a kick in the teeth. Working at Vote.org is an antidote to this feeling. Our staff members work actively each day to change this status quo.
• We’ve got a track record of results. Vote.org reaches more voters of color and young voters than any other program in the nation. Over the course of the year Vote.org ran the largest voter mobilization program in our history, making more than 650 million voter contacts among these traditionally underserved groups. Millions more used Vote.org’s digital tools to register, verify their registration, request an absentee ballot, find their polling location and more.
• Our work allows you to be flexible. Working with vote.org is a short commute. We all work from home, and it is, frankly, the best. Live and work wherever you’d like as long as it’s in the United States, and so long as you can get to a major airport to travel to support our work when needed. We trust you. Need to take 3-5 PM off every day to hang out with your kids after school? Have a doctor’s appointment? No problem. We care more about the quality, the results, and the outputs of the work you do, not about when you do it, or how long it takes.
• We believe that when you feel your best, you do your best. We are proud to offer excellent health benefits. We offer fully covered health, dental and vision for our employees, and generous coverage for your partner and family. Our time off is generous.
• We reward our staff competitively. We offer 401(k) and a Roth 401(k) retirement options, since we want you to retire one day.
• We believe in cultivating a cohesive and inclusive team culture. As an organization, we are deeply committed to diversity. We strongly encourage women, people of color, first-generation Americans, new parents, single parents, people with disabilities, members of the queer community, and talented individuals from all backgrounds to apply to join us.

To apply, submit your application and resume via our website.

Vote.org is an equal opportunity employer. This means that we don’t discriminate against people because of their race, ethnicity, sex, age, religion, national origin, marital status, pregnancy, personal appearance, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, matriculation, genetic information, or political affiliation.