Senior Software Engineer

Who We Are

At Murmuration, we believe that America’s promise is shaped and reshaped by the best ideas and ideals of its communities, and the dreams of the people who believe in a better life for themselves, their families, and each other. 

We help organizations build power in their communities in four key ways: we organize a network of values-aligned partners; we provide deep, data-driven insights into people, places, and perspectives; we develop tools that make organizing and engagement easy and more effective; and we offer services that strengthen our partners’ capacity to lead change in their communities.

We envision an America where every community has what it needs to help people lead healthy, free, and dignified lives. We work to redesign the systems and structures we all depend on — how we learn, live, govern, and solve problems — so that they are just, equitable, resilient, and rooted in shared responsibility. By strengthening the ties that hold communities together, we aim for civic life defined by collective action and care, with effective leadership that truly represents everyone. 

We are a collaborative, curious, and creative team of organizers, scientists, teachers, technologists, campaign veterans, and more who share the unwavering belief that we can use our gifts in service of transforming America — together. We’ve built our team guided by the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And so we support each other relentlessly — rallying together to face challenges the same way we celebrate each other’s wins.

About the Position

Do you thrive in inclusive, thoughtful environments where engineers hold themselves to high standards of technical excellence, ownership, and impact at scale?

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll be responsible for designing, building, and evolving the systems and services that power the Organizer platform. You’ll tackle complex technical challenges, help shape architectural decisions, and play an important role in keeping our backend systems reliable, scalable, maintainable, and secure as we grow.

Your impact will go beyond the code you write. You’ll own problems from discovery through production, partnering closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to turn ideas and requirements into thoughtful, effective solutions. You’ll also have opportunities to share your expertise and help raise the technical effectiveness of the engineers around you. 

Job Level P4

What You’ll Do

• Own outcomes, not just implementation: Understand the problem being solved and remain engaged through deployment and production;
• Exercise technical judgment: Evaluate alternatives, identify tradeoffs, and recommend solutions appropriate to the problem rather than automatically choosing the most sophisticated approach;
• Handle ambiguity: Identify missing information, ask the right questions, and move work forward when a solution has not already been defined;
• Think beyond your immediate changes: Consider how decisions affect system reliability, maintainability, other services, and future engineering work;
• Raise the effectiveness of the team: Share context, provide useful feedback, mentor others, and improve engineering practices;
• Communicate early: Surface risks, uncertainty, dependencies, and changing assumptions before they become delivery problems; and
• Leave systems better than you found them: Look for opportunities to improve reliability, documentation, testing, observability, and developer experience while delivering product work.

• Proven experience designing, developing, and maintaining backend software in production environments;
• Strong understanding of software design principles and the ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs;
• Proven experience designing and maintaining APIs (e.g., GraphQL), distributed services, and data-intensive applications;
• Proven experience debugging complex problems across services, infrastructure, and data;
• Strong understanding of relational and/or NoSQL databases (MongoDB), including data modeling and query performance;
• Strong written and verbal communication skills;
• Proven experience collaborating effectively across Engineering, Product, and other disciplines;
• Familiarity with incident management and logging, monitoring, and observability in production environments;
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and modern deployment environments;
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership in team settings;
• Experience building modern JavaScript/TypeScript solutions; and
• Experience working with event-driven or distributed architectures (e.g., AWS).

Nice to Haves

• Formal degree optional; we welcome candidates from nontraditional or retraining paths;
• Full-stack or open-source contributions;
• Security and privacy-conscious system design;
• Experience planning and executing database migrations and large-scale data operations;
• Experience using AI tools/workflows; and/or
• Experience in civic-tech, nonprofit, or data-driven social-impact products.

Talented Senior Software Engineers come from all walks of life and career. If you are passionate about civic engagement and technology, please apply, even if you do not check every box!

Location and Compensation

The Senior Software Engineer is a full-time, salaried position with a comprehensive benefits package (detail below), open to candidates anywhere in the United States.

The starting salary for this position is $190,576. We set compensation using market data and apply it consistently across the organization to ensure fairness and transparency for everyone in similar roles. 

Our Culture of Care

We work hard to create a culture of care to ensure that our staff are best equipped to lead happy, healthy, and balanced lives. To that end, we offer a comprehensive benefits package which includes:

• 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; and
• A welcoming culture that celebrates diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

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. We welcome new colleagues who will help us nurture this collective effort. Join us.

An Equal-Opportunity Employer with a Commitment to Diversity

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.