Overview

About Swing Left

Swing Left is a national grassroots organization working to elect Democrats up and down the ballot. We make it possible for anyone to make a big impact on the elections that determine the balance of power in our country, by volunteering and donating in key races. Since our founding in 2017, the Swing Left community has raised $38 million directly for Democratic candidates and civic organizations, and completed 35 million volunteer-driven voter contact actions, including door knocking, phone calls, and letter writing.

Swing Left’s custom software integrates with several event management platforms, volunteer organizing platforms, fundraising platforms, and email platforms. We also have a thriving website and email program to make sure our volunteers and other end users have the tools they need to win 2020’s most important elections. And we’ve got a capable analytics platform to make sure our internal stakeholders have the visibility they need. This position will be working on all of these things.

Overview

This role will report to our Head of Product who sets the departments priorities and goals. You will collaborate with her to inform our technical strategy and approach to achieving said goals.

Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership for Swing Left

  • Hire and manage software engineers.
  • Oversee the development (or procurement) of new technology tools and products, and the maintenance of existing assets.
  • Do the capacity planning and other technical planning necessary to proactively keep our software stack running no matter if it’s a sleepy mid-cycle weekday or it’s the busy last weekend before an election during a national TV spot.
  • Guide the technical decisions of the other engineers on the team to keep the code consistent, scalable, maintainable, and reliable.
  • Estimate the work required for large projects.
  • Proactively suggest new ways of tackling problems so they can be solved faster, better, cheaper, or all of the above.
  • Identify places where we have technical debt and proactively create plans to remediate it.
  • Lead the organization through cyber security protocol, ensuring staff follow strong security practices and our technology tools and products used are secure from potential threats.

Support day-to-day engineering needs at Swing Left

  • Work with internal and external stakeholders to help them understand how our software works and answer detailed questions about why it works that way.
  • Troubleshoot issues with our data or our data feeds to event platforms, donation platforms, and email platforms.
  • Continuously monitor health metrics and alerts for our platform and react to anything that seems off.

Develop strategic enhancements to our software products

  • You’re going to commit code. Lots of quality, scalable, well-tested code!
  • Work with our product managers, other engineers, other internal non-technical stakeholders, and external volunteers to understand what they need and how to turn it into working, high-quality, scalable software.

Requirements

  • BA/BS or equivalent experience (we’re not obsessed with paper!).
  • Strong SQL skills.
  • At least some production experience working with Python and Flask, or with very similar frameworks (e.g. Ruby on Rails).
  • At least some production experience working with client-side Javascript frameworks like Vue, AngularJS, or React (we happen to use AngularJS).
  • Some experience directly managing software engineers.
  • 4-6 years of work experience in software engineering.
  • Excellent written and oral communication skills.
  • Ability to work independently and be comfortable with creating clarity where there is otherwise ambiguity.
  • Willingness to work the full gamut of tasks from banal-but-important one-off. requests to highly impactful strategic analysis.

Bonus Points For…

  • Experience working for a political campaign.
  • Experience working on or with progressive political software platforms.

Working at Swing Left

The Senior Director, Software Engineering position is a full-time, remote position. The salary range for this position is 120-130k annually. In addition to health, dental, and retirement benefits, Swing Left’s benefits package includes a professional development fund, a remote work fund, and a technology stipend for all employees. We are happy to answer any questions you have about our benefits, parental leave policies and other, similar benefits 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 believe that the GOP’s bad behavior disproportionately hurts the most marginalized people in society — including people of color, people from working-class backgrounds, people with disabilities, women and LGBTQ people. As we seek to build both a political system and organization that represents and uplifts these voices, we strongly encourage applications from people with these identities and members of other marginalized communities.

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