Software Engineer, Geospatial Data

Civitech; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Vision & Dental Insurance

401(k) plan

Employee Stock Options

Short/Long Term Disability Insurance

Flexible Time Off & Paid Company Holidays

Professional Development Stipend

Job summary

Civitech, a public benefit corporation, is seeking a Software Engineer in Austin, TX. This role focuses on geospatial data and civic engagement tools, emphasizing the development and maintenance of high-quality applications. The ideal candidate has 3-5 years of experience, strong skills in Python and JavaScript, and a passion for contributing to democratic processes.

With an emphasis on collaboration and communication, you will work across teams to enhance the user experience and optimize data pipelines. This is a remote-first position available within 27 states, including Texas.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of software engineering experience.
• Experience with cloud infrastructures, especially GCP or AWS.
• Strong hands-on skills with geospatial data.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain Civitech's applications and infrastructure.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams for feature development.
• Build scalable and secure features in a cloud environment.

Skills

Python

JavaScript

Ruby on Rails

PostgreSQL

Geospatial data handling

Tools

AWS

Google Cloud Platform

GitLab CI

Terraform

Job description

Civitech is a public benefit corporation dedicated to creating a fairer and more equitable democracy by building the tools and infrastructure needed to increase civic participation, empower Democratic candidates to win, and support the success of progressive causes. Since our founding in 2019, over 500 partners—a range of nonprofit organizations, national political committees, and individual campaigns—have utilized Civitech’s tools to reach tens of millions of voters to help create a more equitable and progressive democracy.

Civitech is a remote‑first company hiring within our current footprint of 27 states (AL, AK, CA, CO, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IL, MA, MD, MN, NC, ND, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, SD, TN, TX, VA, WA, WI, WY). We maintain a physical co‑working and collaboration headquarters in Austin, TX.

It is important that our team reflects the diversity of the organizations we seek to serve. We strongly encourage women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and others otherwise underrepresented in the technology sector to apply.

Our Core Values

• We act with Integrity – At Civitech, we hold ourselves to the highest standards and value open and transparent communications with all of our stakeholders. Our rigorous approach to product design, testing, and data science leads to accurate assessments of our outcomes and challenges us to constantly improve our tools.

• We are Changemakers – As a team, Civitech seeks to make transformational change in our democracy by eliminating obstacles meant to hamper contribution from every member of the community.

• We are Collaborators – Buoyed by our mission, we look for opportunities to partner with everyone committed to making democracy easier to participate in. We seek to understand the challenges our partners face and use our skills and creativity to help them solve them.

• We are Bold – We recognize that disruptive change won’t come with doing business as usual. Civitech seeks to revolutionize civic participation by bringing innovation and creativity to politics.

Role Overview

The Engineering team builds scalable, secure, and user‑friendly applications that empower progressive organizations, drive civic engagement, and promote democratic participation. We work closely with product and data teams to deliver impactful solutions.

The Software Engineer, Geospatial Data position sits on our team responsible for civic and geospatial data and reports to that team's Engineering Manager. This team focuses on:

• Tools used by our research team to collect and maintain civic and constituent data, including geographic and boundary data.

• Our GraphQL API product, used both internally and externally.

• Data export products that provide civic data to customers.

• Data engineering for our Voter Registration Mail product.

Our work spans backend‑heavy data products and internal UI tools where reliability is critical. A core challenge lies in evolving our API and data export offerings, thoughtfully advancing functionality and the developer experience while maintaining stability across existing contracts.

What You Will Do

• Participate with other engineers in the design, implementation, and maintenance of Civitech's applications and infrastructure.

• Collaborate cross‑functionally with product, research, and data science teams to develop features from participation in requirements definition through to testing and documentation.

• Build scalable, secure, and high‑performing features in a cloud environment.

• Communicate effectively with team members and contribute to an open and inclusive engineering culture.

• Grow your technical skills and contribute to effective team development practices.

If you were here today, you'd be:

• Optimizing data availability: Developing new features to automatically make election research data available in our customer‑facing tools, reducing latency to our end users.

• Building data pipelines: Developing and maintaining pipelines that ingest, normalize, and serve civic data so it's reliably available to our tools and customers— including geospatial data like shapefiles and political boundary files.

• Bridging data silos: Designing strategies to effectively and broadly share data between operational PostgreSQL databases and BigQuery data warehouses to enrich existing datasets.

• Working with political geography: Reconciling census shapes against political shapes (precincts, council districts, legislative districts) and keeping that data current as new maps move through legislatures and the courts.

• Improving data quality: Diagnosing and fixing bad data – from malformed geometries to inconsistent identifiers – so downstream tools and customers get reliable results.

About You

• You have 3–5 years of software engineering experience.

• You thrive in a fast‑paced startup environment, enjoy building software for the public good, and are passionate about democracy, civics, and politics.

• You are strong in Python, especially for data pipelines, scripting, and automation.

• You're comfortable working across the stack and picking up other languages and frameworks as needed – our applications are built largely in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript/TypeScript.

• You have experience working with cloud environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform or AWS; experience with Azure is also valuable.

• You are skilled in facilitating collaboration between engineers and with partner teams.

• You are experienced with identifying issues and helping to develop solutions, including diagnosing and fixing data quality problems.

• You are used to being actively engaged in planning the team's work via backlog refinement, helping to write user stories, etc.

• You are practiced with written and verbal communication that helps make complex code accessible.

• You prioritize writing maintainable and well‑documented code.

• You demonstrate the ability to effectively give and receive constructive feedback, especially with other engineers.

Additional qualifications (need some but not all): our current work benefits from the below. Please keep in mind that you do not need to bring expertise in all of these to be the right candidate for this role.

Specialty: Geospatial & Political Data

• Hands‑on experience with geospatial data – shapefiles, GeoJSON, projections/coordinate systems, and spatial joins.

• Experience with geospatial libraries and tooling (PostGIS, GeoPandas, Shapely, GDAL/OGR, Fiona, etc.).

• Familiarity with political geography: precincts, city council and county districts, and state/federal legislative districts.

• Understanding of how census geographies differ from political boundaries, and the challenges of mapping between them.

• Awareness of the current redistricting landscape and how court‑ordered and legislative map changes affect downstream data.

Domain Knowledge

• Understanding of U.S. elections administration and/or campaign operations.

Engineering Expertise

• Proficiency in Python for scripting, automation, or data‑related tasks.

• Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript (used within and without Rails).

• Knowledge of building and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications, including performing upgrades, using GraphQL‑Ruby, Turbo/Stimulus, Rspec, etc.

• Understanding of API design, development, and usage, especially GraphQL APIs.

• Experience contributing to automated test suites and ensuring robust coverage.

Systems and Data

• Expertise in PostgreSQL (with PostGIS for geospatial data).

• Experience working with cloud data warehouses, particularly BigQuery.

• Knowledge of building scalable data pipelines with dbt.

• Knowledge of scaling and high‑availability techniques.

Infrastructure

• Experience maintaining infrastructure hosted on AWS or GCP.

• Experience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools, especially GitLab CI and/or GitHub Actions.

• Familiarity with Terraform for Infrastructure‑as‑Code.

Why Work At Civitech?

• Medical, Vision, & Dental Insurance

• 401(k) plan

• Employee Stock Options

• Employer‑paid Life Insurance

• Short/Long Term Disability Insurance

• Flexible Time Off & Paid Company Holidays

• Flexible Spending Account

• Parental Leave

• Flexible Schedules

• Professional Development Stipend

• Monthly Office Upkeep Stipend

$90,000 - $120,000 a year

Status: Full-time

Civitech is unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time; all applicants must possess independent US work authorization.

Civitech utilizes E-Verify to verify eligibility to work in the United States. This verification step occurs strictly after a formal offer has been extended and accepted, following the completion of Form I‑9. Please find more information about our participation in this program here.

Civitech provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or protected veteran status, in strict accordance with federal, state, and local compliance standards.

No recruiters or external staffing agencies, please.