Senior Engineering Manager, Elections

Change.org is searching for a Senior Engineering Manager of the Elections team to establish a technical approach and hire / lead an engineering team for a new 0-1 product focused on helping voters get informed around local elections.

The successful functioning of democracy relies on informed citizens, yet many voters lack the information they need to make educated decisions in local elections, leaving them to vote uninformed or abstain from voting altogether. Over the next 6-9 months we endeavor to answer the following questions:

• How might we educate voters with a best-in-class mobile-first voting experience?
• How might we build tools for supervoters & endorsers to help inform fellow citizens?
• How might we engage candidates to interact with their potential constituents?

You’ll start as a hands-on primary code contributor, defining the technical approach, guiding architecture, and assembling a top-tier engineering team. With a mind towards both speed and scalability, you’ll balance the integration of this new product with our existing infrastructure, ensuring a high-quality, sustainable experience for voters. As you build and manage a team from the ground up, your expertise will ensure that the technology decisions you make today set the stage for success in the years to come.

From mobilizing over 5 million people to investigate the fires in the Amazon, to mobilizing nearly 3 million against war and famine in Yemen, to large-scale mobilizations for the people of Iran and against the war in Ukraine, and calling for Racial Justice in the US, many movements were born on Change.org. Dozens of local, national, and international victories are happening every day thanks to the strength of our members who are changing the lives of people around the world. We want to help them go even further and we need your help! 

Key Outcomes:

• Serve as a hands-on primary contributor to the codebase, actively driving development and setting a high standard for technical excellence.
• Define a technical approach by evaluating our current stack and understanding previous learnings to inform which technologies to use.
• Hire and maintain a high performing team that is fully integrated into the organization, that embraces a growth mindset, continuous improvement and inclusion, where members have built strong relationships with department colleagues and stakeholders leading to mutual trust and respect.
• Drive the strategic planning and decision-making processes within their immediate team, providing insights and recommendations that drive innovation, efficiency, and long-term success.
• Collaborate effectively with stakeholders from other departments or teams, representing the engineering team's interests, and influencing decision-making processes to align with project goals and organizational objectives.
• This job is expected to participate in our on call rotation.

The most important core competencies for the role are:

Team building and management:

• Build and manage an engineering team including definition of profiles,  sourcing, recruitment, onboarding, and retention of top talent.Foster a high-performance, positive, inclusive team culture that promotes collaboration, creativity, and innovation while keeping a sustainable pace and high team morale.
• Ensure team is integrated into the organization such that members feel trusted, respected and have strong relationships with other colleagues.
• Provide regular feedback and performance evaluations, identify opportunities for skill development, create career growth plans, and support the professional advancement of team members.
• Lead the team from 0-1, starting as a hands-on individual contributor while laying the foundation for future team growth.

Technical skills:

• Passionate about coding, with recent experience shipping impactful, user-facing products.
• Full-stack expertise with experience building scalable systems, particularly with Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Elixir, React, JavaScript/TypeScript, GraphQL, and SQL-based databases.
• Skilled in defining and optimizing data schemas tailored to product needs and integrating data from diverse sources.
• Deep understanding of webstack technologies, capable of making informed, strategic technology decisions for a new 0-1 product while balancing speed and long-term integration goals.

Planning & Execution:

• Develop and execute strategic plans for technical initiatives aligned with business objectives.
• Collaborate with product and design teams to establish quarterly objectives and define tactics to meet them.
• Break down complex projects into actionable plans with clear timelines and accountability, ensuring iterative delivery of user-facing software.
• Build MVPs for rapid validation through experimentation and user data, scaling only after validation.

Architecture & Design, Performance:

• Design and implement architecture optimized for fast iteration while ensuring long-term maintainability.
• Evaluate and improve the current technology stack to inform decisions for a new product, navigating discussions around stack formation and integration.
• Identify and address opportunities to enhance system performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Set and maintain standards for system quality, driving technical excellence.

Communication & Collaboration:

• Proactively communicate with stakeholders, including executives, product managers, and cross-functional teams, to align technical initiatives with business objectives and priorities.
• Partner and collaborate effectively across functions such as product, design, devops, QA, analytics and with colleagues located in different timezones.
• Advocate for the engineering team's needs and priorities, representing their interests in decision-making processes and strategic discussions.
• Lead by example in fostering an open, inclusive and transparent culture.

Target experience: 

• 5 years of direct management experience
• 5-8 years of experience with full stack web service development
• 5 years of experience in frontend technologies like React/JavaScript/TypeScript
• 5 years of experience in at least one backend language that we use at Change: Nodejs, Rails, Elixir
• Experience with infrastructure as code technologies like Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS
• Experience building products from the ground up

Interested? Great! Here's what you should know:

This is a full time role based in the United States or Canada. We’re currently able to hire staff based in the following US locations: AK, AZ, CA, CT, DC, FL, GA, IA, IL, KS, MA, MD, MO, NC, NJ, NV, NY, OR, PA, RI, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI.  We’re currently able to hire staff based in the following Canadian provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario.

Our compensation philosophy is based on pay equity. All of our salaries are determined before we launch a role – they are based on a predetermined salary scale, the level on that scale and the cost of labor for that location. The annual salary of a Senior Engineering Manager is: $242,500 USD in San Francisco, New York, is $230,500 USD in Austin, Boston LA and Seattle, is $206,000 USD in all other US locations, is $227,500 CAD in Vancouver, Toronto, $211,000 CAD in Victoria, Calgary, and is $208,000 CAD in all other Canada locations.

Benefits and perks also vary based on location. 

Our evaluation process is as follows:

• Recruiter screen
• Second round interviews with our GM of Elections and Director of Engineering/VP of Engineering
• Team interviews with Software Engineers from our Engineering team (which will include a live coding session) and our VP of Design
• Final stage interviews with our CTO and Head of Talent/Head of Engagement

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting amazing candidates like you, so please don’t hesitate to apply—we’d love to meet you. We also know it’s rare for someone to meet 100% of the qualifications. Please apply anyway!

We actively encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to apply. At Change.org, we are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We invest in programs to support our diverse workforce, offer inclusive onboarding experiences and affinity groups, celebrate the heritage of our staff, provide training on working across differences, and maintain fair and transparent salary scales. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or culture.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for candidates with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

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