Cloud Database Engineer at ActBlue

ABOUT US

ActBlue is a nonprofit that builds tech and infrastructure for Democratic campaigns, progressive-aligned causes, and people trying to make an impact in order to fuel long-term, people-powered change. If you’ve ever given online to a Democrat or progressive organization, chances are you’ve used our powerful online fundraising platform.

We put power in the hands of small-dollar donors and help thousands of groups — from presidential candidates to environmental organizations — build grassroots movements. We envision a democracy where everyone looking to make progressive people-powered change can easily and effectively deploy their resources, energy, and creativity to shape our country and futures. Each and every one of us, from the political activists to the tech innovators to the customer service pros, is fully committed to our mission.

THE OPPORTUNITY:

We are seeking a Cloud Database Engineer who is passionate about database automation and building great tools in a security-conscious environment. In this role, you will develop and execute long-term strategy around the design and implementation of database architectures that support business requirements and achieve high performance, availability, and security.

We offer autonomy, responsibility, and amazing colleagues geeking out about politics and tech all day.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Develop and execute long-term strategy around the design and implementation of database architectures that support business requirements and achieve high performance, availability, and security.

• Work with product, platform, and data teams to identify, mitigate, resolve and/or circumvent performance issues related to product features the organization prioritizes.

• Collaborate with development teams to optimize database code in application layers.

• Conduct performance tuning and testing of database systems, including queries, stored procedures, and indexing strategies.

• Implement automation of database installation, configuration, and maintenance.

• Develop and implement database backup, recovery, and failover procedures.

• Assist in the design and development of data models and database solutions.

• Provide guidance on database best practices to engineers and other stakeholders; inform the development or augmentation of processes related to said practices.

• Ensure database infrastructure is up-to-date with the latest technology trends and security patches.

• Develop and maintain documentation regarding database configurations, architectures, and procedures.

• Serve as the point of contact for database-related queries and technical support.

• Learn from alerts. After an event, we learn from it, continuously improving our infrastructure, monitoring, or applications to keep the same issue from ringing alarms again.

• Build visualizations of our data to understand the performance of our systems and recommend improvements to remove bottlenecks and points of failure.

• Anticipate and proactively address security concerns from both process and technology standpoints.

• Participate in the incident response (on-call) rotation.

WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING WITH:

• Stack: Kubernetes, Docker, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Node.js, Redis

• Tooling: Terraform, Jenkins

• Hosting: AWS (RDS and Aurora)

• Monitoring: DataDog

• Databases: RDS and containerized (mostly PostgreSQL)

WHAT YOU'LL BRING:

• Extensive experience in doing integration testing across large applications to ensure data integrity across multiple systems.

• Experience automating database administration tasks.

• Experience managing databases in a high volume, mission-critical environment, to include:

• Correctly optimizing for OLTP vs. OLAP traffic

• Mature database scaling techniques (sharding, partitioning, etc.)

• Extraction of business logic into application layers

• Experience with database scaling, replication, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

• Knowledge of and a passion for repeatable configuration management using IaC and good software engineering practices

• Knowledge of AWS and big data solutions (Redshift, EMR, etc.)

• Knowledge of database administration

• An allergy to manual processes

• Extremely valuable, but not required: Experience scaling a Rails monolith application, with attention to both the technical and cultural aspects of doing so.

OUR ENGINEERING VALUES:

• We believe that ideas are more important than technologies.

• We understand that the tools we build have real-world consequences for millions of people and take that responsibility seriously.

• Security is at the center of everything we do. We are always on the lookout for ways to further harden our platform.

• We know that code isn’t just a set of instructions for machines, but communication with other humans; style, elegance, and respect are important.

• We believe that an ability to balance paying off technical debt and rapidly completing a project contributes to the health of the codebase, engineering team, and organization.

• We believe that being correct isn’t enough; respect for your colleagues and users is fundamental.

LOCATION AND COMPENSATION:

This posting is for a full-time, remote, salaried position. Travel may be required on a limited basis to attend all-staff and departmental retreats (1-2 times per year). Additional travel may be required for select positions. ATS is currently authorized to support remote work employees in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington D.C. and Wisconsin.

Salary Range Details:

Salary Range: $173,676 - $192,209

ActBlue is committed to consistent compensation practices across our organization. Final salary offers will take into account factors such as candidate experience, interview performance and current team salary parity.

BENEFITS:

• Flexible work schedules and an unlimited time-off policy

• Fully paid and trans-inclusive health, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families; plus fully-paid health reimbursement arrangement to use for out of pocket expenses and fully-paid short- and long-term disability

• Fully paid basic and AD&D life insurance and a voluntary supplemental life insurance option

• Dependent and health care flexible spending account options

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) benefits for employees

• Automatic 2% Employer-paid 401K contribution, plus up to an additional 6% match on employee contributions

• A minimum of three months paid medical, family and parental leave (for all new parents, adoptions included)

• Commuter or home-office benefits, including a $1,000 home-office setup allowance for all new full-time remote employees

• Additional perks including quarterly snack deliveries and digital subscriptions to the Boston Globe & New York Times

ActBlue is unable to sponsor work visas at this time.

Bargaining Unit position: The terms and conditions of this position are subject to a collective bargaining agreement with the Communications Workers of America, the exclusive bargaining agent of covered ActBlue Technical Services employees.

INCLUSION STATEMENT:

ActBlue is deeply committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity. We commit to retaining, developing, recruiting, and hiring a diverse staff community. We honor the dignity of all. We celebrate their unique qualities. And we recognize the wide range of human differences, backgrounds, and intersectional identities that enrich the workspace and help us better meet our mission. If you feel a connection to our mission and see your interests reflected in this job description we encourage you to apply - even if you don’t meet every requirement.

ActBlue is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities throughout the interview and employment process, including using our online system to apply for a position. If you would like to request an accommodation, please contact us at [email protected] to get started.

*ActBlue will never ask candidates to buy equipment, nor will we email from anything other than an actblue.com or actbluetech.com email address.