{"id":193495,"url":"https://alion.io/job/murmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer","title":"Staff Data Platform Engineer","company":{"id":19788,"name":"Murmuration","domain":"murmuration.org","url":"https://alion.io/company/murmuration","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-21T05:46:15Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":152000,"max_usd":267000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":111},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon CloudWatch","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Bitbucket","optional":false},{"name":"Dagster","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":false},{"name":"DynamoDB","optional":false},{"name":"Flink","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"MongoDB","optional":false},{"name":"New Relic","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Time Series","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-02T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T02:04:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":50,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":50},"description":"Who We Are\nAt Murmuration, we believe that America's promise is shaped and reshaped by the best ideas and ideals of its communities, and the dreams of the people who believe in a better life for themselves, their families, and each other.\nWe help organizations build power in their communities in four key ways: we organize a network of values-aligned partners; we provide deep, data-driven insights into people, places, and perspectives; we develop tools that make organizing and engagement easy and more effective; and we offer services that strengthen our partners' capacity to lead change in their communities.\nWe envision an America where every community has what it needs to help people lead healthy,\nfree, and dignified lives. We work to redesign the systems and structures we all depend on - how we learn, live, govern, and solve problems - so that they are just, equitable, resilient, and rooted in shared responsibility. By strengthening the ties that hold communities together, we aim for civic life defined by collective action and care, with effective leadership that truly represents everyone.\nWe are a collaborative, curious, and creative team of organizers, scientists, teachers, technologists, campaign veterans, and more who share the unwavering belief that we can use our gifts in service of transforming America - together.\nWe've built our team guided by the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And so we support each other relentlessly - rallying together to face challenges the same way we celebrate each other's wins.\nAbout the Position\nWe are seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to build opinionated paved roads across engineering.\nMurmuration builds technology that helps our partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively in their communities. Our products weave together engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data with intuitive applications that help partners better understand and act within the communities they serve. Our team is intentionally multidisciplinary and partner-focused. We succeed together by aligning planning, execution, and learning across engineering, product, design, research, data, and partner success. We build complex, data-driven systems that need to work reliably during critical moments, scale as our partners grow, and remain understandable and maintainable as communities and their needs evolve.\nMurmuration needs a Staff Data Platform Engineer who improves how teams provision, secure, monitor, troubleshoot, and operate production data systems. The role is hands-on, but its larger purpose is leverage: reusable infrastructure, better defaults, clearer playbooks, and stronger operational visibility. This Staff role oversees operational efficiency: tuning, right-sizing, and choosing data stores.\nThe Staff Data Platform Engineer is one of the key subject matter experts for datastores. The expertise includes designing, deploying, optimizing, securing, and maintaining databases in the cloud. Each team owns its own data stores, architecture, and access patterns, and you’ll help shape how those choices get made. Your scope will be both wide across teams, stacks, and technologies, as well as deep with a team and solution as required.\nThis role is suited for a deeply experienced individual contributor whose technical judgment and engineering rigor raises the quality of deliverables across the entire organization. You excel in settings where product priorities and direction can shift rapidly. Your commitment to building inclusive, high-trust, and high-performing teams is visible across the technology organization. And you believe, like we do, that how we build is just as important as what we build.\nJob Level: P5\nWhat You’ll Do\nAs a Staff Data Platform Engineer, you will work across all engineering teams and report to one of our Directors of Software Engineering. You will define guidelines and processes for data access and storage, champion best practices and lead by example, and build reusable and opinionated infrastructure as code to remove friction and increase the capability for all engineers. Putting into practice contemporary methodologies as described in Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly: Campbell & Majors)\nDatabase Administration (DBA)\nCreate re-usable IAC (infrastructure as code) to manage database resources;\nSecure the databases including provisioning human and system users via automation;\nEnsure operational monitoring is integrated with application and end-to-end data flow monitoring; and\nOptimize database runtimes.\nDesigning, implementing, and testing logical and physical database backup and recovery schemes in accordance with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity objectives\nShape the Data Platform\nReview what data store is best suited for an application;\nEvaluate our database ecosystem and help refine the Data North Star;\nEvaluate tools and services and ensure our data tool belt is well balanced with power, extensibility, training, and operational effort;\nHelp teams model their data schemas;\nReview data access libraries and general access patterns;\nBuild paved roads for database infrastructure in the cloud: IAC is plug and play with minimal effort and has best practices built in; and\nImprove and expand existing code bases: reinforce secure coding practices, identify vulnerabilities early, and treat data privacy and access control as first-class concerns.\nElevate the Organization\nReduce technical debt, improve system quality, and contribute to objectives that span the broader organization;\nEstablish best practices for data schemas, data sharing, data access layers; raise the technical bar across the organization through documentation, reference implementations, advocacy, and role modeling;\nMentor senior engineers and help emerging technical leads build the judgment, ownership, and skills to grow; lead technical discussions, drive design consensus, and model the standards you expect from others;\nChampion secure data practices at a systemic level, identify vulnerabilities across the product, and treat data privacy and access control as organization-wide concerns; and\nBe like Ted Lasso: believe, build trust, and demonstrate kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability.\nRequirements\nTechnical Depth and Judgement\nDeep, hands-on expertise across critical technical domains with the proven ability to lead system design, architectural patterns, and engineering best practices; your sound technical judgment shapes important decisions;\nAbility to choose the best tool for a scenario by optimizing the most functional coverage for the least total cost of ownership;\nAbility to reason across No-SQL vs. relational stores, transactional vs. analytic data architectures, and make sound design decisions for the systems that depend on them;\nComfort making sound decisions with imperfect information; able to design long-term architectures with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns, and to clearly articulate tradeoffs and alternatives explored;\nAbility to communicate and defend well-reasoned solutions through written documentation, sharing context, what alternatives were considered, and how conclusions were reached;\nA proactive steward of technical quality, identifying and prioritizing technical debt, defining test strategy, and evaluating risk from bugs and architectural problems before they become blockers; and\nSkill at debugging the most complex problems at any level of the stack.\nScope, Initiative, and Execution\nProven ability to lead technical strategy and execution for significant initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems, balancing quality, performance, and cost while keeping stakeholders aligned on tradeoffs and risks;\nProven experience in designing objectives aligned with division and organizational goals, anticipating technical challenges and proposing solutions before they become blockers;\nDemonstrated experience in the estimation of large, cross-team projects with significant unknowns, including mitigation plans for resolving those unknowns to reduce risk and deliver incremental value;\nProven strategies to involve the right people, delegate clearly, communicate consistently, and follow through as an owner until an objective is delivered; and\nAbility to multiply team and engineering effectiveness through technical leadership, tooling, infrastructure, and process improvements.\nOrganizational Impact\nTechnical leadership across multiple teams, acting without direct management responsibilities, influencing outcomes through role modeling, documentation, and advocacy rather than authority;\nDemonstrated track record as a mentor to senior engineers with a proven ability to develop future technical leaders, building their judgment, ownership, and skills through 1:1 guidance and small-group knowledge sharing;\nA driver of standards and best practices that raise the technical bar across the organization, creating processes that instill ownership behavior in others;\nAbility to represent engineering effectively in cross-functional discussions, leading alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders on complex, multi-team initiatives; and\nA leader by example, proactively sharing context and learnings, building POCs or prototypes where most cost-effective, and creating the kind of high-trust, high-performing team culture that makes everyone better.\nWhat You Bring to the Table\nFoundations\n10+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated data specialization and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of transactional and analytic scenarios;\nExperience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems;\nA test-driven mindset with experience writing, maintaining, and driving test strategy at the team or product level;\nA track record of effective collaboration with product, data science, and R&D teams, bridging technical and domain-specific perspectives across disciplines; and\nExperience with using AI as a daily assistant, along withthe judgement needed to know when and where to best use or not use AI.\nData\nExpert level experience with No-SQL, relational, and columnar data stores: either direct or transferable operating experience with Mongo, DynamoDb, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake;\nExpert level ability to write fluent SQL and No-SQL, design schemas, and define migrations and optimize read and write performance;\nDeep data design skills including No-SQL collections and indexing, relational normalization, and data warehousing facts and dimensions;\nExperience working with transformation tools such as dbt;\nExperience with data replication and change data capture (CDC) tools such as Kafka source connectors, Database Migration Services (DMS), or AirByte;\nExperience with data pipeline orchestration tools such as Dagster or Airflow with an understanding of scheduling, dependency management, and pipeline reliability;\nExperience with streaming data pipelines such as Flink;\nWorking knowledge of time series data modeling and its applications; and\nWorking knowledge of geospatial data modeling and usage.\nInfrastructure and Observability\nDeep experience with cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and production-grade software at scale; production experience with AWS, including services for compute, storage, and observability;\nProficiency with IAC tooling such as CDK, SAM, Serverless Framework, or Terraform;\nWorking knowledge of deployment pipelines such as Git Hub Actions or Bit Bucket Pipelines; and\nDirect experience with observability tooling: logging, metrics, and tracing using tools such as CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana.\nNice to Haves\nFamiliarity with Voter File Data;\nExperience with or interest in political data; and\nBackground in political tech, civic tech, advocacy, or mission-driven organizations.\nBenefits\nLocat...","description_format":"text","description_chars":14855,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Dental insurance","Equity","Home office","Parental leave","Professional development","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Nonprofits & Foundations","Statistics & Open Data Portals"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-03T02:33:12Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":27,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.608,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":49,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-21T05:46:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/murmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/murmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-22T04:03:47Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4202,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":19788},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=19788"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmurmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmurmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmurmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/murmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmurmuration-staff-data-platform-engineer"}]}