Senior Backend Engineer

About Reach

At Reach, we are building an app that helps progressive organizations harness their people-power like never before. Since we first built the product on the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaign in 2018, over 100,000 organizers across 1000 campaigns, labor unions, and non-profits have used the tool. In the coming months, we are designing and building out features which will make the app an even more critical part of the progressive organizing toolkit for some of the largest and highest-profile campaigns in the country. Through this work, Reach will be a core component of victories in 2024 and beyond.

We are a fast-moving, boldly progressive Public Benefit Corporation based in Queens, NY. Our fully-remote team is made up of passionate activists, engineers, designers, and organizers who have come together to build a product we all care deeply about. Our customers are the candidates, campaigns, and organizations who are building the future and fighting for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice.  Our users are the grassroots activists who are changing the word.

Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on a small team, you’ll be collaborating with our front end engineers, UX designers, and product managers to design, develop, and implement backend solutions powering large-scale web and native applications. You will be joining a small, fast-moving team at this early stage in a new political technology startup and thus you will immediately have significant ownership over our code base and engineering architecture, working closely with our founders on product strategy and execution.

Responsibilities

  • Scoping, architecting, modeling and implementing multiple new product features
  • Getting your hands dirty, writing API endpoints, schemas, data-handling functions, and other code
  • Advising and guiding the evolution of our product roadmap, providing feedback on feasibility and estimated timelines for new feature development
  • Improving and optimizing deployments and infrastructure to allow Reach to rapidly scale to hundreds of thousands of users with no sacrifice in speed or reliability and efficient use of resources
  • Developing and upholding solid engineering standards and practices, and helping junior engineers meet those standards through code review, constructive feedback, and supervision

Who You Are

  • You are comfortable across the stack knowing your way around server-side web frameworks, leveraging relational databases to get the job done, provisioning and tweaking web servers, and building scalable APIs in Python.
  • You are passionate about progressive politics and comfortable in a deeply political atmosphere. We’re a mission-driven company, and everything we do is guided by political impact and custom-built for the progressive movement. Politics are an integral part of everyday life at Reach.
  • You ideally have 3+ years of professional work experience, including project leadership positions and ideally in startups where you’ve seen things scale (and break)
  • In addition to writing quality software, you also enjoy the other aspects of building a new company: designing features, making good product decisions, programming at all levels of the stack, and the wearing of many hats.
Your skills and experience will hopefully include:
 
  • Server-side development, especially Python and Elixr
  • SQL and transactional databases, especially Postgres
  • REST,  GraphQL and building scalable APIs
  • Developing, releasing, documenting, and supporting backend code
  • Multithreaded and asynchronous programming
  • Problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills

If you aren’t an expert on everything here, don’t worry about it. As long as you are open-minded and game to try new things, we want to hear from you.

Details

  • This position is fully remote, but you should be able to collaborate with the team between 10am and 6pm ET.
  • We offer a salary of $101k. Our salaries are transparent and flat across all members of the team.
  • Salaried positions include end-of-year profit sharing, health insurance, vision, dental, 401(k), commuter benefits, paid time off, and paid family leave.

Application Deadline

We will continue accepting applications until the role is filled, but the Priority Deadline for application submission is Monday, April 3.

Apply Now

We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of the activists that we stand with and fight alongside. We especially encourage women, non-binary people, people of color, and others who are underrepresented in the tech industry to apply.