Staff Data Platform Engineer

Job Description

Company: Murmuration
Location: United States
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Permanent (Full-time)
Pay / Compensation: $225,324

About the Role

At Murmuration, we believe that America’s promise is shaped and reshaped by the best ideas and ideals of its communities. We help organizations build power in their communities in four key ways: we organize a network of values-aligned partners, provide deep data-driven insights, develop tools that make organizing easy and effective, and offer services that strengthen our partners’ capacity to lead change. We envision an America where every community has what it needs to help people lead healthy, free, and dignified lives.

Murmuration builds technology that helps our partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively. Our products weave together engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data with intuitive applications. We are seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to build opinionated paved roads across engineering. The role is hands-on, but its larger purpose is leverage: building reusable infrastructure, better defaults, clearer playbooks, and stronger operational visibility.

The Staff Data Platform Engineer acts as one of the key subject matter experts for datastores, overseeing operational efficiency including tuning, right-sizing, and choosing data stores. Your expertise will include designing, deploying, optimizing, securing, and maintaining databases in the cloud. You will work across all engineering teams and report to one of our Directors of Software Engineering, championing contemporary methodologies as described in Database Reliability Engineering.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

Database Administration (DBA)

• Define guidelines and processes for data access and storage, champion best practices, and lead by example.
• Create re-usable IAC (infrastructure as code) to manage database resources.
• Secure the databases including provisioning human and system users via automation.
• Ensure operational monitoring is integrated with application and end-to-end data flow monitoring.
• Optimize database runtimes.
• Design, implement, and test logical and physical database backup and recovery schemes in accordance with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity objectives.

Shape the Data Platform

• Review what data store is best suited for an application.
• Evaluate our database ecosystem and help refine the Data North Star.
• Evaluate tools and services and ensure our data tool belt is well balanced with power, extensibility, training, and operational effort.
• Help teams model their data schemas.
• Review data access libraries and general access patterns.
• Build paved roads for database infrastructure in the cloud: IAC is plug and play with minimal effort and has best practices built in.
• Improve and expand existing code bases: reinforce secure coding practices, identify vulnerabilities early, and treat data privacy and access control as first-class concerns.

Elevate the Organization

• Reduce technical debt, improve system quality, and contribute to objectives that span the broader organization.
• Establish best practices for data schemas, data sharing, data access layers; raise the technical bar across the organization through documentation, reference implementations, advocacy, and role modeling.
• Mentor senior engineers and help emerging technical leads build the judgment, ownership, and skills to grow.
• Lead technical discussions, drive design consensus, and model the standards you expect from others.
• Champion secure data practices at a systemic level, identify vulnerabilities across the product, and treat data privacy and access control as organization-wide concerns.
• Be like Ted Lasso: believe, build trust, and demonstrate kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability.

Requirements & Qualifications

Foundations

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated data specialization and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of transactional and analytic scenarios.
• Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems.
• A test-driven mindset with experience writing, maintaining, and driving test strategy at the team or product level.
• A track record of effective collaboration with product, data science, and R&D teams, bridging technical and domain-specific perspectives across disciplines.
• Experience with using AI as a daily assistant, along with the judgement needed to know when and where to best use or not use AI.

Data

• Expert level experience with No-SQL, relational, and columnar data stores: either direct or transferable operating experience with Mongo, DynamoDb, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake.
• Expert level ability to write fluent SQL and No-SQL, design schemas, and define migrations and optimize read and write performance.
• Deep data design skills including No-SQL collections and indexing, relational normalization, and data warehousing facts and dimensions.
• Experience working with transformation tools such as dbt.
• Experience with data replication and change data capture (CDC) tools such as Kafka source connectors, Database Migration Services (DMS), or AirByte.
• Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools such as Dagster or Airflow with an understanding of scheduling, dependency management, and pipeline reliability.
• Experience with streaming data pipelines such as Flink.
• Working knowledge of time series data modeling and its applications.
• Working knowledge of geospatial data modeling and usage.

Infrastructure and Observability

• Deep experience with cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and production-grade software at scale; production experience with AWS, including services for compute, storage, and observability.
• Proficiency with IAC tooling such as CDK, SAM, Serverless Framework, or Terraform.
• Working knowledge of deployment pipelines such as Git Hub Actions or Bit Bucket Pipelines.
• Direct experience with observability tooling: logging, metrics, and tracing using tools such as CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana.

Technical Depth, Judgement & Leadership

• Deep, hands-on expertise across critical technical domains with the proven ability to lead system design, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices.
• Ability to choose the best tool for a scenario by optimizing the most functional coverage for the least total cost of ownership.
• Ability to reason across No-SQL vs. relational stores, transactional vs. analytic data architectures, and make sound design decisions.
• Comfort making sound decisions with imperfect information and designing long-term architectures with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability in mind.
• Ability to communicate and defend well-reasoned solutions through written documentation, sharing context, and outlining alternatives considered.
• A proactive steward of technical quality, identifying and prioritizing technical debt, defining test strategy, and evaluating risk from bugs and architectural problems.
• Skill at debugging the most complex problems at any level of the stack.
• Proven ability to lead technical strategy and execution for significant cross-team initiatives, balancing quality, performance, and cost.
• Proven experience in designing objectives aligned with division and organizational goals, anticipating technical challenges.
• Demonstrated experience in the estimation of large, cross-team projects with significant unknowns and mitigation plans.
• Proven strategies to involve the right people, delegate clearly, communicate consistently, and follow through as an owner.
• Demonstrated track record as a mentor to senior engineers and a driver of standards and best practices that raise the technical bar.
• Ability to represent engineering effectively in cross-functional discussions across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

• Familiarity with Voter File Data.
• Experience with or interest in political data.
• Background in political tech, civic tech, advocacy, or mission-driven organizations.

Benefits & Perks

• Health, vision, and dental insurance with 100% of premiums covered for you and qualifying family members.
• Retirement benefits with a 5% employer match.
• A flexible unlimited PTO plan.
• Generous paid parental leave.
• Pre-tax commuter benefits.
• A company laptop.
• A flexible remote work environment.
• A home office setup stipend for all new employees.
• Monthly reimbursement for remote work expenses.
• A yearly professional development fund.
• Mental health and wellness benefits through Calm and Better Help.
• Yearly in-person staff retreats.
• A welcoming culture that celebrates diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

Location and Compensation The Staff Software Engineer role is a full-time, salaried position open to candidates anywhere in the United States. The starting salary for this position is $225,324. We set compensation using market data and apply it consistently across the organization to ensure fairness and transparency for everyone in similar roles.

Commitment to Diversity At Murmuration, we believe a vibrant, representative democracy depends on the inclusion of diverse voices, lived experiences, and perspectives. The best ideas don’t come from a single person or ideology — they emerge at the intersection of different backgrounds, identities, and viewpoints. We are proud of our commitment to building an organization and culture shaped by respect, empathy, and collaboration, where our team’s diversity fuels innovation, civic engagement, and meaningful change.

Murmuration is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and as an organization committed to diversity and the perspective of all voices, we consider applicants equally of race, gender, color, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, disability, political affiliation and national origin. We reasonably accommodate staff members and/or applicants with disabilities, provided they are otherwise able to perform the essential functions of the job.

Note: Murmuration is two organizations working together to pursue our mission of amplifying the power of civic engagement: Murmuration Research Institute, a 501(c)(3) that conducts research to identify, design, and create the data, tools, and insights that build healthier and more equitable communities; and Murmuration, Inc., a 501(c)(4) that supports organizations working across the country on the nation’s most challenging issues with access to data, tools, and research that build healthier and more equitable communities.