Staff Software Engineer

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 Do you see yourself as a mission-driven engineer who believes that great products emerge from strong teams? Do you thrive in inclusive, thoughtful environments where engineers hold themselves to high standards of technical excellence, ownership, and impact at scale? We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to contribute to one of our most ambitious efforts: building a new product from the ground up while raising the bar for how our entire engineering organization works. 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. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will join the Explorer Team as we evolve the product into general availability from its pilot implementation. Explorer is a data visualization product that facilitates political data exploration using interactive maps, charts, and exportable tables, supplemented by an NLP-powered search function. On this small, close-knit team, you will establish the engineering patterns, operational foundations, and testing strategies needed to evolve Explorer into a secure, reliable, GA-ready platform. You and the team will build Explorer’s core platform and user experience, expanding a near-greenfield code base to design, build, and evolve secure backend services, interactive data visualizations, and responsive user interfaces. You will also produce high-quality documentation that improves knowledge sharing, onboarding, and the long-term maintainability of the product. In addition to your Explorer work, you will serve as a staff engineer across multiple projects, applying your expertise to solving some of the organization’s most complex challenges. 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 near-greenfield settings where product priorities and direction can shift rapidly. Your commitment to building inclusive, high-trust, 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: IC5 What You’ll Do Drive to General Availability Shape Explorer's technical future: advise on technical priorities, dependencies, and complexity; propose and defend well-reasoned solutions with clear documentation of tradeoffs and alternatives; Take a pilot implementation from limited release to general availability, including making early architectural decisions, validating technical assumptions, and iterating toward a scalable design; Harden experimental systems for production readiness, including reliability, performance, observability, testing, and operational excellence; Architect for the long term: design and build the systems and architectures that will serve Explorer for years, with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns; Improve and expand the existing code base: reinforce secure coding practices, identify vulnerabilities early, and treat data privacy and access control as first-class concerns; Drive test strategy, proactively identify and address technical risks, and drive quality improvements at the team level; and Reduce technical debt, improve system quality, and contribute to objectives that span the broader organization. Elevate the Team Resolve ambiguity, navigate requirements that are actively being shaped, and bring structure and clarity without waiting for perfect specs; Establish best practices for test strategy, code quality, and system design; raise the technical bar across the organization through documentation, advocacy, and role modeling; Mentor senior engineers and help emerging technical leads build the judgment, ownership, and skills