Software engineer (Cycle Role)

Higher Ground Labs; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 134,000 - 161,000; Full time

Job summary

Relentless is seeking a Software Engineer to join the Rally team on a cycle-length engagement. You will focus on reducing friction in development, shipping faster, and strengthening engineering practices in a small team.

You’ll work with AI-driven workflows, review AI-generated specs and code, and build systems that ensure safe, confident deployments. This remote role emphasizes pragmatic, well-documented solutions, with emphasis on testing, CI/CD, and collaboration across technical and

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience building and shipping product-focused web applications on a software development team.
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted or agentic development tools, and thoughtful judgment about what they produce.
• A generalist skill set spanning backend and frontend using modern web technologies; Rally is primarily built using TypeScript, React/Remix, and NodeJS.
• Sound technical judgment when reviewing others' code, including a feel for risk and for when a change warrants deeper scrutiny.
• A commitment to pragmatic, maintainable solutions with a focus on testing and documentation.
• Hands-on experience with automated testing and CI/CD pipelines; experience with Playwright or a similar end-to-end testing framework is a strong plus.
• Experience using and deploying applications on the cloud; Rally is built on Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience with relational database management systems, such as Postgres.

Responsibilities

• Identify friction and bottlenecks in how we build and ship, and design pragmatic improvements to our development process, tooling, and infrastructure.
• Bring strong technical judgment to code review across the team's pull requests — much of it AI-generated — helping ensure changes are safe, sound, and ready to merge.
• Strengthen our release process by turning release-readiness into explicit, repeatable checks, and by building tooling that makes shipping to production safer and less dependent on any single person.
• Design and build automated testing — including end-to-end coverage in our staging environment using Playwright — so the team can move quickly with confidence rather than leaning on manual checks.
• Build synthetic monitoring and smoke tests that verify expected behavior in production after each release.
• Contribute to backend development and ongoing maintenance work as capacity allows.
• Favor simple, well-documented, maintainable solutions that a small team can confidently own after the engagement ends.
• Communicate clearly and collaborate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders in a remote environment.

Skills

Web app development

AI-assisted development tools

Backend/Frontend generalist

Code review judgment

Testing & documentation

CI/CD pipelines

Cloud deployment (GCP)

PostgreSQL

Tools

TypeScript

React/Remix

NodeJS

Playwright

Google Cloud Platform

PostgreSQL

Job description

Reports to: CTO

Location: Remote

Classification: Full-time

ABOUT RELENTLESS

Relentless is an organizing company focused on unlocking political power through relational organizing. Relational organizing is the simple, proven concept that people talking to their friends and family is more effective than strangers talking to strangers. Our flagship product, Rally, is a social graph, power-mapping tool, and program management platform that makes running scaled relational programs simple. Our in-house program team brings their deep experience to supercharge the programs that run on Rally and mobilize communities at scale to have meaningful conversations, get out the vote, and so much more.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Software Engineer on our Rally team, you'll help us do our best work through one of the most demanding stretches of the election cycle. This is a focused, cycle-length engagement with a simple aim: help us ship faster, and with more confidence. You'll do that by building automations and tools, and by helping to strengthen the engineering practices that give a small team leverage. Rather than owning a stream of net-new product features, you'll make the whole team faster and safer — improving how we review code, test our work, and ship to production, and removing the friction that slows a lean team down.

We're an AI-native team in practice, not just in name. We use LLM-based agents throughout our development lifecycle — drafting specs, implementing tickets, and reviewing code. We're looking for someone to help us manage that work: exercising judgment on what the AI produces and building the systems that let us do it safely and at speed. This is high-impact engineering work; it's simply pointed at *how* we build and ship rather than at feature development. If you find as much satisfaction in helping a whole team do its best work as in shipping something yourself, you'll do well here.

DETAILS & COMPENSATION

Location: Remote.

Compensation: $12,000/mo.

Schedule: Full-time, temporary through the end of November 2026.

JOB DUTIES

• Identify friction and bottlenecks in how we build and ship, and design pragmatic improvements to our development process, tooling, and infrastructure.
• Bring strong technical judgment to code review across the team's pull requests — much of it AI-generated — helping ensure changes are safe, sound, and ready to merge.
• Strengthen our release process by turning release-readiness into explicit, repeatable checks, and by building tooling that makes shipping to production safer and less dependent on any single person.
• Design and build automated testing — including end-to-end coverage in our staging environment using Playwright — so the team can move quickly with confidence rather than leaning on manual checks.
• Build synthetic monitoring and smoke tests that verify expected behavior in production after each release.
• Contribute to backend development and ongoing maintenance work as capacity allows.
• Favor simple, well-documented, maintainable solutions that a small team can confidently own after the engagement ends.
• Communicate clearly and collaborate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders in a remote environment.

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS

We don't expect any one person to bring everything below, and you certainly don't need to check every box to apply. If some of this describes you and the work excites you, we'd love to hear from you — we hire for people, not checklists, and we especially welcome applicants from backgrounds underrepresented in tech.

• 3+ years of experience building and shipping product-focused web applications on a software development team.
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted or agentic development tools, and thoughtful judgment about what they produce. Much of our workflow — from spec to implementation to review — runs on directing LLM-based agents, so you're comfortable working this way and eager to keep getting better at it.
• A generalist skill set spanning backend and frontend using modern web technologies; Rally is primarily built using TypeScript, React/Remix, and NodeJS.
• Sound technical judgment when reviewing others' code, including a feel for risk and for when a change warrants deeper scrutiny.
• A commitment to pragmatic, maintainable solutions with a focus on testing and documentation.
• Hands-on experience with automated testing and CI/CD pipelines; experience with Playwright or a similar end-to-end testing framework is a strong plus.
• Experience using and deploying applications on the cloud; Rally is built on Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience with relational database management systems, such as Postgres.

Bonus points for any of the following, though none are required:

• Experience designing or improving AI-assisted development workflows, tooling, or prompting practices.
• An understanding of data engineering pipelines and asynchronous processing.
• Experience working with other tools in the progressive political space.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Relentless provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. We welcome applicants from any educational background, race, ethnicity, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, sex, age, immigration status, citizenship status, national origin or ancestry, marital status, pregnancy, criminal record, mental or physical disability or disorder, HIV antibody status, parental or familial status, or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.