Head of Engineering

The DNC Tech Team

In its continuing mission to build infrastructure to help Democrats win campaigns up and down the ballot, the Democratic National Committee's Tech Team is seeking an empathetic, collaborative engineering leader to guide the team in the run up to the 2024 elections. Our BigQuery data warehouse, early voting data pipelines, voter protection software, and security infrastructure were vital in winning countless elections in 2020 and 2022. As we look to the future, we're excited to build on this foundation and seek a Head of Engineering who will mentor our engineering managers, advise our tech leads, and work with product, data, and security peers on the joint future vision of our work.

Who We Are

We are a fully remote, distributed team living in 23 states and from a variety of backgrounds. Some of us have worked in political campaigns, others in public sector tech, and others in industry. We value diversity in perspective, lived experience, and the many paths one may take towards becoming a software engineer. We believe deeply in the promise of breaking the boom-bust cycle of political tech work and building technology infrastructure that will support campaigns from cycle to cycle and will improve with every iteration.

In this position you will..

• Craft the long term vision for our platforms and infrastructure with a core group of staff engineers and engineering managers.
• Work closely with your team and our CTO to foster an inclusive and diverse engineering team, which prioritizes developing careers, building a healthy and collaborative culture across engineering, product managers, and data science teams, and running a hiring process valuing diversity of background and experience
• Partner with our product, data, and security leads to shape an effective road map framework that delivers the maximum value for our users in line with our vision, and empower our teams to make strategic decisions balancing user research, technical needs and emergent opportunities
• Bring a security-first mindset to how we build and support products, including strategies around technical debt management, logging and alerting systems, and minimizing attack surface
• Be a senior technical partner to other teams outside of DNC Tech, providing consultative support and advice and help make build-buy-consult decisions on a dynamic range of projects
• Drive improvements on our existing processes ranging from tech design to code review to incident response and vendor management to deliver the high quality software projects with an eye towards efficiency, security, and iterability.

What we will look for…

• Multiple years of experience managing engineering teams, including managing and mentoring other managers, and guiding groups through periods of strategic and technical change
• A demonstrable track record of partnering closely with product, data science/analytics, and non-technical stakeholders in data-driven, cross-functional, and fast-paced collaborative teams
• Experience in modern scaled or cloud-based technology environments, including taking ownership of legacy projects and guiding effective decisions on refactoring technical platforms, or rewriting where appropriate. Thought partnership on systems design and architectural choices with engineers and tech leads is a common aspect of the role!
• An ability to rapidly build trust across multiple audiences and teams, providing clear and actionable feedback to peers, direct reports, and partners
• A commitment to championing diversity and inclusion within software engineering as exhibited by a concrete history of guiding and enriching the careers of your direct reports
• Experience driving large-scale strategic and tactical thinking towards developing and launching major initiatives with a focus on driving clarity and decisiveness across multiple teams

What we would be excited to see…

• A background in politics is helpful, but not essential. If you're coming from the tech industry, having experience as a volunteer and having end-user familiarity with the tools that campaigns use will be a boost for your onboarding, but we've also had people thrive here who were completely new to political tech
• Recent hands-on coding experience is similarly helpful but not essential. We have a strong group of staff engineers and tech leads who would welcome a peer to exchange ideas with, but this role is, first and foremost, a strategic people manager
• Experience working with Google Cloud Platform and/or Amazon Web Services, including helping teams think through infrastructure decisions and work in multiple cloud platforms
• Experience with application security training for engineers. We not only take security seriously, but model it publicly for a broad ecosystem of progressive data teams.

Benefits:

The DNC offers a generous benefit package, including:

- More than 30 days of paid time off, including Federal holidays, vacation, and personal days;

- Health and dental insurance for employee and dependents;

- 90% paid by the DNC, 10% paid by employee;

- Supplementary vision plans available to employees for purchase;

- Up to a 4% employer match DNC 401(k) plan;

- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) available to DNC employees and their dependents at no cost to staff;

- Pre-tax Flexible spending account benefits available to employee and dependents.

Physical Requirements:

The DNC is committed to supporting employees of varying abilities and to providing reasonable accommodations to enable individuals with disabilities to succeed at the DNC. The requirements of this role, related to its physical demands, described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. 

All DNC employees must be able to operate a computer and use a cell phone. For roles at the DNC that include frequent business travel expectations, we can discuss reasonable alternatives to travel in some instances. Most roles also require communicating with key external stakeholders of the organization in person, via the telephone, or via email. We welcome applicants with questions about accommodations to request to speak with our Human Resources Department. When an applicant with a disability requires an accommodation to have an equal opportunity to compete for this position, they may request it in writing by emailing our Human Resources Department.

Essential functions of the role include:

- Working from a computer for long periods of time; and,

- While performing the duties of this job, the employee may also frequently be required to communicate using the telephone, email, and in person with stakeholders.

The DNC requires all employees to be "up to date" on COVID-19 vaccination status as prescribed by the CDC as a condition of employment, unless otherwise prohibited by applicable law. If you seek a reasonable accommodation in relation to the DNC’s COVID-19 policy, you should speak to the HR team prior to reporting to an office location.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), is committed to diversity among its staff, and recognizes that its continued success requires the highest commitment to obtaining and retaining a diverse staff that provides the best quality services to supporters and constituents. The DNC is an equal opportunity employer and it is our policy to recruit, hire, train, promote and administer any and all personnel actions without regard to sex, race, age, color, creed, national origin, religion, economic status, sexual orientation, veteran status, gender identity or expression, ethnic identity or disability, or any other legally protected basis. The DNC is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities in the hiring process and on the job, as required by applicable law. The DNC will not tolerate any unlawful discrimination and any such conduct is strictly prohibited.