Engineering Lead

CTA is seeking an Engineering Lead to spearhead the modernization of one of the most critical data systems in progressive politics. CTA is undertaking work with a key progressive organization to completely rebuild and manage key data infrastructure. As an architect of this ground-floor initiative, you will play a central role in rebuilding a piece of data infrastructure central to the progressive ecosystem. This career-defining opportunity offers the chance to shape a high-impact project from the ground up, leveraging modern data technologies and engineering practices, all while assembling and leading a new, cross-functional team. You’ll work within the supportive framework of an established, mission-driven organization with a history of delivering transformative solutions.

Reporting to CTA’s Technical Director, the Engineering Lead will be a key technical executor for the initiative. They will take a hands-on role in writing production-grade code, reviewing PRs, optimizing performance, and debugging complex issues and edge cases. This role also includes leading CI/CD, deployments, and developer workflows, while translating technical architecture into day-to-day execution for the rest of the team. The Engineering Lead will work closely with the Technical Director, product peers, and client stakeholders to help synthesize diverse perspectives into a coherent technical strategy, and will bring care and precision to documenting and improving systems over time. This role requires an in-the-weeds technologist with the depth and breadth of experience to ensure the team is executing at the highest level.

About us

Community Tech Alliance is a group of progressive technologists and strategists formed to provide data infrastructure building blocks to the progressive ecosystem at a low cost. CTA seeks to uplevel program impact by unlocking the potential of data, using software and data engineering, and removing the barriers to entry. We are a small team of engineers, data practitioners, product managers, and strategists looking to create infrastructure for progressive change.

Community Tech Alliance believes strongly that

• Inclusive teams are strongest, and supportive work environments take investment, intentionality, and openness
• Empathy is the cornerstone of building smart technology solutions
• All team members should take ownership of the project and team’s development
• Iteration is key, and smart solutions require action not perfection
• Nothing great has been built without making mistakes and learning from them

Other points relevant to this role

• We are a fully remote organization, but have synchronous working hours
• Our client for this project is in Washington, D.C. You must be available for synchronous work during Eastern Time business hours

About you

• You have led or been on a team that has been accountable for a large, complex project
• You are able to take in multiple perspectives from your team and stakeholders, synthesize tradeoffs, and chart a course of action that moves the project forward—all while remaining diplomatic
• You think through migrations and understand dataflows across multiple systems as second nature
• You can identify ambiguity and help the team find clarity
• You have been on or worked with product engineering teams
• You value continual learning and prioritize work and assignments that help the larger group develop deeper understandings
• You are receptive to feedback and open to introspection when something goes wrong
• You recognize that an environment of continuous improvement only happens when you support psychological safety

Technical background

• Familiarity with cloud migrations including on-prem to cloud or cloud-to-cloud transitions
• Strong experience writing production-grade code, debugging complex issues, and optimizing performance in real-world systems
• Experience designing and maintaining scalable data processing systems, including data orchestration pipelines and ETL workflows
• Familiarity with modern data warehousing solutions; hands-on experience with GCP and BigQuery is preferred
• Comfortable serving as a scrum master, breaking down work and supporting team execution
• Preference for open-source and cloud-native tooling where appropriate, with a bias toward maintainability and cost-efficiency
• Experience documenting systems and processes clearly to support collaboration and long-term sustainability
• Proven track record managing CI/CD pipelines, deployments, and developer workflows in cloud environments

Technology experience

• Python, SQL
• Cassandra, Redis, Google BigQuery, Hadoop
• Dagster, Airflow, dbt
• GCP: GCS, GKE, Composer, Cloud Functions, IAM, Pub/Sub, DataProc
• Terraform

We don’t expect every applicant to have had the experiences described or have worked with every technology we’ve listed, so we urge you to apply if you’re interested and some of the above apply to you! We’re looking for the right humans and hiring for the people over the position above all else.

Additional requirements

• Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without restriction
• Must be located in the US and able to work ET business hours

Physical demands

The physical demands here represent those that an employee must meet to perform the essential functions of this job successfully. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions:

• Ability to sit at a computer monitor for extended periods of time
• Occasional travel to Washington DC and other US-based locations for company retreats

Salary and benefits

Salary is between $170/yr and $190/yr, commensurate with experience.

Community Tech Alliance provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.