Software Engineer, Geospatial Data

Civitech is a public benefit corporation focused on enhancing democracy through technology. They are seeking a Software Engineer, Geospatial Data to develop scalable applications that manage civic and geospatial data, collaborating with various teams to enhance civic engagement and democratic participation.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• 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

Requirements:

• 3–5 years of software engineering experience
• Strong in Python, especially for data pipelines, scripting, and automation
• Comfortable working across the stack and picking up other languages and frameworks as needed - applications are built largely in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript/TypeScript
• Experience working with cloud environments, particularly Google Cloud Platform or AWS; experience with Azure is also valuable
• Skilled in facilitating collaboration between engineers and with partner teams
• Experienced with identifying issues and helping to develop solutions, including diagnosing and fixing data quality problems
• Actively engaged in planning the team's work via backlog refinement, helping to write user stories, etc
• Practiced with written and verbal communication that helps make complex code accessible
• Prioritize writing maintainable and well-documented code
• Demonstrate the ability to effectively give and receive constructive feedback, especially with other engineers
• 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
• Understanding of U.S. elections administration and/or campaign operations
• 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
• 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
• 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