Senior Software Engineer

Murmuration builds data-driven insights, tools, and services that help organizations strengthen civic engagement and community power. The Senior Software Engineer designs, builds, and evolves systems and services for the Organizer platform, with a focus on reliable, scalable, maintainable, and secure backend systems. The role also owns problems through production, contributes to architectural decisions, and supports the technical effectiveness of the engineering team.

Responsibilities:

• Own outcomes, not just implementation: Understand the problem being solved and remain engaged through deployment and production
• Exercise technical judgment: Evaluate alternatives, identify tradeoffs, and recommend solutions appropriate to the problem rather than automatically choosing the most sophisticated approach
• Handle ambiguity: Identify missing information, ask the right questions, and move work forward when a solution has not already been defined
• Think beyond your immediate changes: Consider how decisions affect system reliability, maintainability, other services, and future engineering work
• Raise the effectiveness of the team: Share context, provide useful feedback, mentor others, and improve engineering practices
• Communicate early: Surface risks, uncertainty, dependencies, and changing assumptions before they become delivery problems; and
• Leave systems better than you found them: Look for opportunities to improve reliability, documentation, testing, observability, and developer experience while delivering product work

Requirements:

• Proven experience designing, developing, and maintaining backend software in production environments
• Strong understanding of software design principles and the ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs
• Proven experience designing and maintaining APIs (e.g., GraphQL), distributed services, and data-intensive applications
• Proven experience debugging complex problems across services, infrastructure, and data
• Strong understanding of relational and/or NoSQL databases (MongoDB), including data modeling and query performance
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Proven experience collaborating effectively across Engineering, Product, and other disciplines
• Familiarity with incident management and logging, monitoring, and observability in production environments
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and modern deployment environments
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership in team settings
• Experience building modern JavaScript/TypeScript solutions
• Experience working with event-driven or distributed architectures (e.g., AWS)
• Full-stack or open-source contributions
• Security and privacy-conscious system design
• Experience planning and executing database migrations and large-scale data operations
• Experience using AI tools/workflows
• Experience in civic-tech, nonprofit, or data-driven social-impact products