Staff Engineer, Data and AI

Change.org; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 201,000 - 236,000; Full time

Job summary

Change.org is seeking a Staff Engineer, Data and AI Enablement to build and scale the data and AI platform powering trusted insights, personalization, and AI-enabled experiences for millions of changemakers. You will report to the Senior Director of Data Engineering and partner with teams across the organization to shape architecture, pipelines, and tooling.

This full-time role is based in the United States, Canada or Mexico, with compensation aligned to location and scale.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with distributed systems or data platforms.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale batch/streaming systems (e.g., Kafka, Spark).
• Designing cloud-native data infrastructure using AWS/GCP, IaC, containers, and orchestration.
• Experience taking data/ML/AI systems into production with reliability and observability.
• Practical AI infra knowledge: embeddings, vector retrieval, LLM eval and observability.

Responsibilities

• Partner with PMs to translate opportunities into scalable data and AI solutions.
• Deliver reliable data products enabling features, experiments, and personalization.
• Build and scale batch and real-time pipelines for data and model workflows.
• Evolve data/ML platform architecture across orchestration, storage, compute, and access.
• Improve data trust via modeling, contracts, testing, lineage, and privacy controls.
• Create reusable tools and standards to empower teams to work independently.
• Maintain a resilient platform with observability, on-call readiness, and cost optimization.
• Lead architectural decisions and mentor engineers in AI and data infrastructure.

Skills

Distributed data systems

Software engineering judgment

Data modeling

Cloud architecture

Operational excellence

AI engineering fluency

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Airflow

Redshift

AWS

GCP

Vector DBs

Job description

Change.org is searching for a Staff Engineer, Data and AI Enablement to build and scale the data and AI platform behind Change.org powering trusted insights, personalization, and AI-enabled experiences that drive greater impact for millions of people creating change). You will report to our Senior Director of Data Engineering. As a key member of our Data and AI Enablement team, you’ll partner with teams across the organization to build and scale the platform, pipelines, architecture, and tooling that powers features, experimentation, and trusted decision-making.

Change.org is the world’s largest platform for democracy.

At a time when dissatisfaction with democracy globally is at an all-time high, we’re investing heavily in using AI to build an operating system for modern democracy. This includes our platform for giving people greater voice, a personalized voter guide for elections, and a new product which aims to bring people across the political spectrum together to identify shared solutions.

To realize this vision, we're building a team at the intersection of technology and civic engagement — bringing together top talent focused on giving citizens a direct voice, strengthening accountability, and building stronger, more resilient democracies..

Key Outcomes:

Partner with PMs to translate business and product opportunities and our shared strategic vision into scalable data and AI solutions, from early exploration through production rollout.

Deliver reliable data products that support data and AI enabled features, experimentation, personalization and decision-making across the company.

Build and scale batch and real-time pipelines that ingest, transform, and prepare high-quality data for reporting, machine learning training, model evaluation, feature generation, and production inference.

Evolve the data and ML platform architecture across orchestration, storage, compute, streaming, and data access, using technologies such as Airflow, Kafka, Redshift, Glue, Vector DBs and other cloud native services.

Improve data trust and usability by establishing strong practices for data modeling, schema evolution, data contracts, testing, lineage, privacy controls, freshness, and recoverability.

Enable teams to work more independently by creating reusable tools, standards, and paved paths that make it easier to discover data and build dependable workflows.

Maintain a resilient and efficient platform through observability, alerting, runbooks, incident response, on-call participation, performance tuning, and ongoing cost optimization.

Raise the technical bar for data and AI infrastructure by leading architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, reviewing designs and code, reducing technical debt, and advancing the use of AI and agentic workflows.

This job is expected to participate in our on call rotation

The most important core competencies for the role are:

Distributed data systems expertise: Able to design and scale reliable batch and real-time data architectures.

Strong software engineering judgment: Builds maintainable, testable production systems in Python and/or comparable languages.

Data modeling and SQL expertise: Designs scalable, trustworthy data models and data products.

Cloud and platform architecture: Makes sound trade-offs across compute, storage, orchestration, streaming, infrastructure, and cost.

Operational excellence: Demonstrates strong operational ownership through observability, incident response, on-call participation, runbooks, performance tuning, and building resilient systems.

AI engineering fluency and technical leadership: Understands modern AI and LLM infrastructure and leads through architecture, collaboration, mentoring, and influence.

7+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building distributed systems, data platforms, ML platforms, or comparable production infrastructure.

Hands-on experience building and operating large-scale batch and/or streaming data systems, ideally including Kafka, Spark, workflow orchestration and similar technologies.

Experience designing and operating cloud-native data infrastructure using technologies such as AWS/GCP, infrastructure as code, containers, orchestration, and managed data services.

Experience taking data or ML/AI systems into production, including reliability, observability, deployment, evaluation, and operational ownership.

Practical experience with modern AI infrastructure, such as embeddings/vector retrieval, LLM evaluation and observability, or agentic workflows.

Interested? Great! Here's what you should know:

This is a full time role based in the United States, Canada or Mexico.

We’re currently able to hire staff based in the following US locations: Alaska (AK), Arizona (AZ), California (CA), Colorado (CO), Connecticut (CT), District of Columbia (DC), Florida (FL), Georgia (GA), Illinois (IL), Iowa (IA), Kansas (KS), Maryland (MD), Massachusetts (MA), Michigan (MI), Minnesota (MN), Missouri (MO), New Jersey (NJ), New York (NY), North Carolina (NC), Oregon (OR), Pennsylvania (PA), Rhode Island (RI), Texas (TX), Vermont (VT), Virginia (VA), Washington (WA), Wisconsin (WI).

We're also able to hire staff in Canada (AB, BC, ON) and Mexico.

Our compensation philosophy is based on pay equity. All of our salaries are determined before we launch a role – they are based on a predetermined salary scale, the level on that scale and the cost of labor for that location.

The annual salary of a Staff Engineer, Data and AI is $236,000 in San Francisco and New York, and is $224,000 in Austin, Boston, Chicago, DC, LA and Seattle and is $200,500 in all other US locations.

The annual salary of a Staff Engineer, Data and AI is $221,500 CAD in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, and is $205,500 CAD in Victoria and Calgary and is $202,000 CAD in all other Canadian locations.

The annual salary of a Staff Engineer, Data and AI is $1,727,000 MXN anywhere within Mexico.

Benefits and perks also vary based on location.

Our evaluation processis as follows:

Technical Assessment

Team Interview

We recognize that people assess their qualifications differently, and you may not meet every requirement listed. If you believe you could be successful in this role, we encourage you to apply.

Change.org is an open platform designed to serve people across the full range of viewpoints. We expect all candidates to have thought about whether it’s a fit for you to work at a genuinely open platform like this, in which you will regularly be exposed to opinions and campaigns which are in sharp contrast to your own values and/or beliefs.

We are an equal opportunity employer and consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity [or expression], national origin, protected veteran status, disability, age, or any other status protected by law.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout our recruitment process. If you need assistance or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know.

Change.org voluntarily collects limited demographic information for government reporting and to support our diversity and inclusion efforts. Providing this information is entirely optional and anonymous, and is not used in hiring decisions.

The categories in this survey are standardized and may not reflect how everyone describes themselves.

Professional-level English proficiency is required for all roles. While we are a global company, we ask that all resumes and application responses be submitted in English.

We take pride in our benefits offerings

All benefits listed are offered globally. Additional benefits vary by country of employment.

Quick Stats

Change By the Numbers

2007

Year Founded

150

Team Members

15

Countries

95%

Employees who are proud to work at change.org

Working Together

Life at Change

01

Embedding
DEI

Change.org has a mission to cultivate a dynamic and inclusive workplace culture where every employee feels valued, connected, and inspired to contribute their best. We aim to enhance engagement through meaningful interactions, continuous development opportunities, and fostering a sense of community and belonging.

02

Bonding
& Traveling

Connecting is a non-negotiable, and we invest in onboarding retreats called Ready for Change that bring us closer and help us better understand ourselves, the business, and others. We also love our EOY parties and departmental get-togethers throughout the year.

03

Building
Community

There are four Community Resource Groups (CRGs)—API, Women/Nonbinary, Latinx, and LGBTQIA+—that hold regular meetings. Past CRG events have included panels, speaker series, cooking classes, happy hours, and all team call presentations.

04

Constantly
Communicating

We hear from leadership through monthly C Team reports, departmental Town Halls, and transparency updates on our All Team Calls.

Our Values

Values Guide Our Every Move

We match the size of the problem we are addressing by being radically ambitious, with an urgency to make progress in driving systemic impact.

We take responsibility

We each take responsibility for bringing our best selves to work, building a great culture, and owning the outcomes needed to achieve our mission.

We are open to a wide diversity of perspectives from our colleagues and users, and are actively curious about what we might learn about others, our work, and ourselves.

We are courageously candid

We are committed to courageous, constructive, and candid communication in order to get the best out of our individual and team performance.

We build connection

We value and invest in interpersonal connection and understanding to build trusting relationships, effective teams, and a healthy organizational culture.

Awards

Celebrating our Culture

Hiring

Our Talent Philosophy

We’ve intentionally designed each step of our hiring process to optimize for efficiency, transparency and fairness.