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Ballotpedia is seeking a 100% remote, full-time, Lead Data Engineer to help us expand our elections coverage.
Ballotpedias Tech team supports the organization in making high-quality political data and unbiased encyclopedic content available to the American public by improving many aspects of Ballotpedias web presence and the behind-the-scenes tools used by staff. This position will be tasked with improving our ability to mine and ingest political data, and with technical leadership for our software developers, junior data engineers, and data engineering interns.
For example, we are interested in developing interfaces to pair human and computer transformations on messy data sets about candidates seeking election (names, dates, political parties, and similar). We are less interested in the analytics at this time, and primarily focused on tools to help us acquire and clean data to be used as public-facing content.
The ultimate goal of this role is to help close the ballot information gap in the U.S., where voters in many locations cannot find 1) who will be on their ballot in upcoming elections, and/or 2) robust information about those candidates and what they stand for.
The ideal candidate has at least 3 years of career experience in data engineering.
Responsibilities
As a Lead Data Engineer, you will:
- Lead data pipeline architecture and software decisions, collaborating with other software and data engineers on the team, creating actionable projects for the data team out of department goals.
- Supervise and monitor the work as assigned to data engineering team members, ensuring the system gets built as architected and designed, meeting business goals and objectives as intended.
- Design, develop, and maintain data pipelines, data mining tools, and user interfaces, optimizing for research and cost efficiencies.
- Champion data governance best practices among the team.
Qualifications and Characteristics
A Lead Data Engineer must:
- Have at least three years career experience in data engineering.
- Have proven experience with modern database languages and technologies, including SQL and Python
- Experience with cloud-based technologies, preferably AWS
- Be dedicated and willing to work hard to support the mission of Ballotpedia
- Be humble, seeking to improve the work of the rest of the staff, and approaching projects as a team member.
- Have an unending appetite for learning and mastering new technology.
- Be innovative, and willing to take a leadership role within the team.
Environment
The Lead Data Engineer will work remotely from their home location. All Ballotpedia staff work remotely. To join Ballotpedia, you must have a computer with Internet access. Ballotpedia uses Google Workspace (Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, and more), Slack, and Asana to accomplish our goals. Some familiarity with the Google Workspace, Slack, and Asana are helpful.
Ballotpedia has a flexible work environment, BP Flex, in which every employee enjoys unlimited vacation and flexibility in scheduling. Each employee will be oriented to the principles of Ballotpedias flexible environment during new employee training.
Compensation
The starting pay range for the Lead Data Engineer is $95,000-$110,000, and commensurate with experience.
In addition to salary, Ballotpedia offers bonuses based on performance and a $8,000 annual benefits stipend, which may be used to pay for a full benefits package, including health, vision, and dental insurance; retirement accounts; and more. If benefits are not elected, the $8,000 stipend is taxed as regular income and added to salary.
To Apply
To apply, click on Apply for this job below and fill out the form.
Please attach:
- Rsum
- Cover letter detailing your interest in Ballotpedias mission and this position
Please ensure that either your rsum or cover letter include your current address. Applications without addresses will not be accepted.
About Ballotpedia
Ballotpedia is a collaborative team of fast learners and creative problem solvers who are eager to work hard to make the world a better place. We believe the world will be a better place if every citizen has access to information to make informed decisions about their vote in every election in which they are eligible to vote: primary, general, and special elections; federal, state, and local offices.
We work diligently to present the available information about elections, candidates, judges, ballot measures, policies, and more in a way that enables our readers to vote with confidence and to act as engaged citizens outside of the polling booth.
Ballotpedia readers, like Ballotpedia staff, are special people.
When we launched in 2007, we did not go out of our way to seek new readers. Starting with our small team of visionary idealists, nerds, and aspiring political journalists, we just wrote the best unbiased online articles we could, especially about ballot measures. Readers found those articles in droves. It turns out there was an unclaimed audience out therepeople who wanted straightforward facts about political issues, and were willing to read at length instead of just scanning the headlines.
If you build it, they will come:'' our readers came to our neutral oasis in growing numbers; weve had many millions of lifetime pageviews, we reached nearly half of all voters in 2020, and, in the month surrounding the November 2020 election, we were the 77th most-visited website in the U.S.
Weve come to realize that we need to meet our readers where they are. In doing so, over the past five years, weve grown our email newsletter program from infancy to include more than 2,000,000 opt-in subscribers with more than a dozen newsletters to choose from. We are working in numerous ways to help put our neutral information in front of people at the times when they most need it, including on mobile phones while youre standing in the voting booth. We firmly believe that our readers, and the mindset we help them cultivate, are essential to the preservation of our great civilization in a world where too many others are fighting to get us all addicted to sensational posts and the irrational decisions they foster.
If this is a mission youd be willing to work hard to achieve, and if this is a team youd be willing to work hard withJOIN US.
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