Senior Software Engineer at Blue Rose Research

Are you passionate about progressive politics? Are you excited to help improve the national discourse on progressive issues? Are you ready to leverage your skills and experience in software engineering to protect our democracy? Then we would love to work with you!

Blue Rose Research builds cutting-edge products used by the most important progressive organizations in the country. Our research undergirds short-term and long-term strategy for advancing progressive causes and has a trusted track record among key decision makers.

The R&D team within Blue Rose Research has a storied history, and has worked with central players to develop strategy and direct hundreds of millions of dollars of resources. The work produced by the team is widely regarded as among the most technically sophisticated in the space. If you join us, you’ll be plugging into a diverse team of decorated engineers, PhD data scientists and political insiders who are closely connected to some of the most important decision makers in the progressive ecosystem.

Blue Rose Research engineers work closely with data scientists and internal stakeholders who liaise with external political partners to design, build, and scale research products. The insights from our products are used for understanding the issues important to the American public, what policies should be supported, how best to argue for them, and much more. We are responsible for research products that are scalable, robust, accurate, and useful.

We’re a fast and dynamic team, and you’ll be contributing to innovative work that evolves week by week. We’re looking for you to bring your passion for engineering, a strong attention to detail, and a desire to make a big impact on a timeline.

In addition to the opportunity to help save American democracy, we offer a competitive salary, medical, dental, and health benefits, and the ability for you to be your full self at work! We have an office in New York City, but we have a remote-first culture as half of the organization resides outside of New York City.

You might work on:

• An end-to-end automated research system that kicks off data collection, automatically runs machine learning models, and returns results at the click of a button
• A self-service web interface for external clients to manage their research projects and visualize the results
• Collaborating with data scientists to productionize and own new machine learning models
• Adding features and enhancing performance of our internal machine learning platform that abstracts away the internals of our TensorFlow machine learning setup
• Automating backend processing systems to launch thousands of surveys and process billions of data points so that we can test thousands of ads and talking points this year
• Scaling our data and modeling pipelines to turn around research projects in under 24 hours
• Working with internal researchers to turn around bespoke research projects

Any project you’ll be working on will involve:

• General coding competency: breaking down problems, domain modeling, separation of concerns, clean and correct implementations
• Familiarity and comfort with Python (almost all our code is in Python)
• Backend engineering: backend business logic, REST APIs, data storage, robustness, monitoring/observability
• Technical reasoning: systems thinking, evaluating trade-offs, having intuition for what's important, thinking about scale/performance
• Communication: being able to communicate your ideas kindly and clearly, both in writing and verbally
• Kindness and teamwork: collaborating effectively on a team and contributing to a warm working environment
• Wearing many hats: working in multi-disciplinary teams, working across the breadth of our tech stack

Some projects involve more specific skills that you can either learn on the job or bring from past experiences:

• Data engineering: ETL, SQL, schema design, data pipelines/workflow systems
• Machine learning engineering: TensorFlow, numerical computing, Apache Beam & Dataflow, regression analysis
• DevOps: Cloud computing/GCP/AWS, k8s, Terraform
• Web development: lightweight HTML/CSS/JS, Flask (we don’t make complex web apps)
• Political data: working with voter files, political survey data, political data science models

We don’t expect every applicant to have expertise in every area listed above. We’re hiring for multiple openings across a range of projects. We encourage you to apply if you don’t feel your experience and background sound like a perfect fit. Many of our team members have taken an unusual path to get to where they are today, and our unique and diverse perspectives make us more effective. We also believe strongly in our team’s ability to learn and excel at new skills and challenges. Join us!

Candidates must be authorized to work lawfully in the United States.

Salary range: $130K-180K / year