Staff Data Platform Engineer

Murmuration; United States; Remote; USD 210,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Murmuration is seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to build opinionated data infrastructure across engineering teams. You will design, deploy, and optimize cloud data stores, enforce best practices, and create reusable infrastructure with strong operational visibility.

The role rewards deep technical judgment and collaborative leadership in a fast-paced civic-tech environment. You will collaborate across data, product, design, and partner success to ensure scalable, secure, and reliable data

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering with data specialization.
• Experience driving secure coding practices and data privacy.
• Strong collaboration with product, data science, and R&D teams.
• Experience using AI as a daily assistant with judgement.

Responsibilities

• Define guidelines for data access and storage; champion best practices.
• Build reusable infrastructure as code to enable engineers.
• Lead by example; improve data tools and playbooks.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leads.
• Champion secure data practices across the organization.

Skills

Data Platform

Infrastructure as Code

Cloud Databases

SQL & NoSQL

Observability

Security

Mentoring

Cross-Functional

Tools

Terraform

AWS

Dagster

Airflow

dbt

Kafka

Datadog

Grafana

Job description

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

We are seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to build opinionated paved roads across engineering.

Murmuration builds technology that helps our partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively in their communities. Our products weave together engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data with intuitive applications that help partners better understand and act within the communities they serve. Our team is intentionally multidisciplinary and partner-focused. We succeed together by aligning planning, execution, and learning across engineering, product, design, research, data, and partner success. We build complex, data-driven systems that need to work reliably during critical moments, scale as our partners grow, and remain understandable and maintainable as communities and their needs evolve.

Murmuration needs a Staff Data Platform Engineer who improves how teams provision, secure, monitor, troubleshoot, and operate production data systems. The role is hands‑on, but its larger purpose is leverage: reusable infrastructure, better defaults, clearer playbooks, and stronger operational visibility. This Staff role oversees operational efficiency: tuning, right‑sizing, and choosing data stores.

The Staff Data Platform Engineer is one of the key subject matter experts for datastores. The expertise includes designing, deploying, optimizing, securing, and maintaining databases in the cloud. Each team owns its own data stores, architecture, and access patterns, and you’ll help shape how those choices get made. Your scope will be both wide across teams, stacks, and technologies, as well as deep with a team and solution as required.

This role is suited for a deeply experienced individual contributor whose technical judgment and engineering rigor raises the quality of deliverables across the entire organization. You excel in settings where product priorities and direction can shift rapidly. Your commitment to building inclusive, high‑trust, and high‑performing teams is visible across the technology organization. And you believe, like we do, that how we build is just as important as what we build.

Job Level: P5

What You’ll Do

As a Staff Data Platform Engineer, you will work across all engineering teams and report to one of our Directors of Software Engineering. You will define guidelines and processes for data access and storage, champion best practices and lead by example, and build reusable and opinionated infrastructure as code to remove friction and increase the capability for all engineers. Putting into practice contemporary methodologies as described in Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly: Campbell & Majors)

Database Administration (DBA)

• Create re‑usable IAC (infrastructure as code) to manage database resources;
• Secure the databases including provisioning human and system users via automation;
• Ensure operational monitoring is integrated with application and end‑to‑end data flow monitoring; and
• Optimize database runtimes.
• Designing, implementing, and testing logical and physical database backup and recovery schemes in accordance with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity objectives

Shape the Data Platform

• Review what data store is best suited for an application;
• Evaluate our database ecosystem and help refine the Data North Star;
• Evaluate tools and services and ensure our data tool belt is well balanced with power, extensibility, training, and operational effort;
• Help teams model their data schemas;
• Review data access libraries and general access patterns;
• Build paved roads for database infrastructure in the cloud: IAC is plug and play with minimal effort and has best practices built in; and
• Improve and expand existing code bases: reinforce secure coding practices, identify vulnerabilities early, and treat data privacy and access control as first‑class concerns.

Elevate the Organization

• Reduce technical debt, improve system quality, and contribute to objectives that span the broader organization;

• Establish best practices for data schemas, data sharing, data access layers; raise the technical bar across the organization through documentation, reference implementations, advocacy, and role modeling;

• Mentor senior engineers and help emerging technical leads build the judgment, ownership, and skills to grow; lead technical discussions, drive design consensus, and model the standards you expect from others;

• Champion secure data practices at a systemic level, identify vulnerabilities across the product, and treat data privacy and access control as organization‑wide concerns; and

• Be like Ted Lasso: believe, build trust, and demonstrate kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability.

Technical Depth and Judgement

• Deep, hands‑on expertise across critical technical domains with the proven ability to lead system design, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices; your sound technical judgment shapes important decisions;
• Ability to choose the best tool for a scenario by optimizing the most functional coverage for the least total cost of ownership;
• Ability to reason across No‑SQL vs. relational stores, transactional vs. analytic data architectures, and make sound design decisions for the systems that depend on them;
• Comfort making sound decisions with imperfect information; able to design long‑term architectures with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first‑class concerns, and to clearly articulate tradeoffs and alternatives explored;
• Ability to communicate and defend well‑reasoned solutions through written documentation, sharing context, what alternatives were considered, and how conclusions were reached;
• A proactive steward of technical quality, identifying and prioritizing technical debt, defining test strategy, and evaluating risk from bugs and architectural problems before they become blockers; and
• Skill at debugging the most complex problems at any level of the stack.

Scope, Initiative, and Execution

• Proven ability to lead technical strategy and execution for significant initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems, balancing quality, performance, and cost while keeping stakeholders aligned on tradeoffs and risks;
• Proven experience in designing objectives aligned with division and organizational goals, anticipating technical challenges and proposing solutions before they become blockers;
• Demonstrated experience in the estimation of large, cross‑team projects with significant unknowns, including mitigation plans for resolving those unknowns to reduce risk and deliver incremental value;
• Proven strategies to involve the right people, delegate clearly, communicate consistently, and follow through as an owner until an objective is delivered; and
• Ability to multiply team and engineering effectiveness through technical leadership, tooling, infrastructure, and process improvements.

Organizational Impact

• Technical leadership across multiple teams, acting without direct management responsibilities, influencing outcomes through role modeling, documentation, and advocacy rather than authority;
• Demonstrated track record as a mentor to senior engineers with a proven ability to develop future technical leaders, building their judgment, ownership, and skills through 1:1 guidance and small‑group knowledge sharing;
• A driver of standards and best practices that raise the technical bar across the organization, creating processes that instill ownership behavior in others;
• Ability to represent engineering effectively in cross‑functional discussions, leading alignment across technical and non‑technical stakeholders on complex, multi‑team initiatives; and
• A leader by example, proactively sharing context and learnings, building POCs or prototypes where most cost‑effective, and creating the kind of high‑trust, high‑performing team culture that makes everyone better.

What You Bring to the Table

Foundations

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated data specialization and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of transactional and analytic scenarios;
• Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems;
• A test‑driven mindset with experience writing, maintaining, and driving test strategy at the team or product level;
• A track record of effective collaboration with product, data science, and R&D teams, bridging technical and domain‑specific perspectives across disciplines; and
• Experience with using AI as a daily assistant, along withthe judgement needed to know when and where to best use or not use AI.

Data

• Expert level experience with No‑SQL, relational, and columnar data stores: either direct or transferable operating experience with Mongo, DynamoDb, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake;
• Expert level ability to write fluent SQL and No‑SQL, design schemas, and define migrations and optimize read and write performance;
• Deep data design skills including No‑SQL collections and indexing, relational normalization, and data warehousing facts and dimensions;
• Experience working with transformation tools such as dbt;
• Experience with data replication and change data capture (CDC) tools such as Kafka source connectors, Database Migration Services (DMS), or AirByte;
• Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools such as Dagster or Airflow with an understanding of scheduling, dependency management, and pipeline reliability;
• Experience with streaming data pipelines such as Flink;
• Working knowledge of time series data modeling and its applications; and
• Working knowledge of geospatial data modeling and usage.

Infrastructure and Observability

• Deep experience with cloud‑native architectures, distributed systems, and production‑grade software at scale; production experience with AWS, including services for compute, storage, and observability;

• Proficiency with IAC tooling such as CDK, SAM, Serverless Framework, or Terraform;

• Working knowledge of deployment pipelines such as Git Hub Actions or Bit Bucket Pipelines; and

• Direct experience with observability tooling: logging, metrics, and tracing using tools such as CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana.

Nice to Haves

• Familiarity with Voter File Data;

• Experience with or interest in political data; and

• Background in political tech, civic tech, advocacy, or mission‑driven organizations.

Location and Compensation

The Staff Software Engineer role 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 $225,324. 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.