[Remote] Software Engineer, Geospatial Data

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Civitech is a public benefit corporation dedicated to creating a fairer and more equitable democracy by building tools and infrastructure that increase civic participation. The Software Engineer, Geospatial Data position focuses on developing scalable and secure applications that manage civic and geospatial data, collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance functionality and stability across products.ResponsibilitiesParticipate with other engineers in the design, implementation, and maintenance of Civitech's applications and infrastructureCollaborate cross-functionally with product, research, and data science teams to develop features from participation in requirements definition through to testing and documentationBuild scalable, secure, and high-performing features in a cloud environmentCommunicate effectively with team members and contribute to an open and inclusive engineering cultureGrow your technical skills and contribute to effective team development practicesOptimizing data availability: Developing new features to automatically make election research data available in our customer-facing tools, reducing latency to our end usersBuilding data pipelines: Developing and maintaining pipelines that ingest, normalize, and serve civic data so it's reliably available to our tools and customers - including geospatial data like shapefiles and political boundary filesBridging data silos: Designing strategies to effectively and broadly share data between operational PostgreSQL databases and BigQuery data warehouses to enrich existing datasetsWorking with political geography: Reconciling census shapes against political shapes (precincts, council districts, legislative districts) and keeping that data current as new maps move through legislatures and the courtsImproving data quality: Diagnosing and fixing bad data - from malformed geometries to inconsistent identifiers - so downstream tools and customers get reliable resultsSkills3–5 years of software engineering experienceStrong in Python, especially for data pipelines, scripting, and automationComfortable working across the stack and picking up other languages and frameworks as needed - applications are built largely in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript/TypeScriptExperience working with cloud environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform or AWS; experience with Azure is also valuableSkilled in facilitating collaboration between engineers and with partner teamsExperienced with identifying issues and helping to develop solutions, including diagnosing and fixing data quality problemsActively engaged in planning the team's work via backlog refinement, helping to write user stories, etcPracticed with written and verbal communication that helps make complex code accessiblePrioritize writing maintainable and well-documented codeDemonstrate the ability to effectively give and receive constructive feedback, especially with other engineersHands-on experience with geospatial data - shapefiles, GeoJSON, projections/coordinate systems, and spatial joinsExperience with geospatial libraries and tooling (PostGIS, GeoPandas, Shapely, GDAL/OGR, Fiona, etc.)Familiarity with political geography: precincts, city council and county districts, and state/federal legislative districtsUnderstanding of how census geographies differ from political boundaries, and the challenges of mapping between themAwareness of the current redistricting landscape and how court-ordered and legislative map changes affect downstream dataUnderstanding of U.S. elections administration and/or campaign operationsProficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript (used within and without Rails)Knowledge of building and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications, including performing upgrades, using GraphQL-Ruby, Turbo/Stimulus, Rspec, etcUnderstanding of API design, development, and usage, especially GraphQL APIsExperience contributing to automated test suites and ensuring robust coverageExpertise in PostgreSQL (with PostGIS for geospatial data)Experience working with cloud data warehouses, particularly BigQueryKnowledge of building scalable data pipelines with dbtKnowledge of scaling and high-availability techniquesExperience maintaining infrastructure hosted on AWS or GCPExperience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools, especially GitLab CI and/or GitHub ActionsFamiliarity with Terraform for Infrastructure-as-CodeBenefitsMedical, Vision, & Dental Insurance401(k) planEmployee Stock OptionsEmployer-paid Life InsuranceShort/Long Term Disability InsuranceFlexible Time Off & Paid Company HolidaysFlexible Spending AccountParental LeaveFlexible SchedulesProfessional Development StipendMonthly Office Upkeep StipendCompany OverviewCivitech is a political technology startup devoted to applying technology-based solutions to civic problems. It was founded in 2019, and is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA, with a workforce of 11-50 employees. Its website is https://civitech.io/.