During the 2024 election cycle, Switchboard worked with over 2,700 campaigns and organizations from school board to federal races, strengthening Democratic digital fundraising and organizing programs up and down the ballot. In addition to the automated messaging platform that we launched in 2021, through which organizations have sent billions of messages, we’ve continued to build out an integrated suite of tools, including an emailer, forms builder, and fundraising analytics dashboards, with the goal of bringing together multiple outreach channels with powerful analytics in an easy-to-use platform. Over the next few years we plan to continue to grow our offerings while internally growing our team.
We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to help lead the growth and development of our engineering team. You’ll be managing and mentoring the engineering managers on the team, helping them to develop as people leaders and fostering a positive environment where they and their reports can grow and thrive. You’ll also play an important role in steering the engineering culture on the team, and work cross-functionally with product, design, data, and operations to help make sure that we’re executing well on projects, and have the right resources behind them. As we grow the engineering team, you’ll drive our engineering recruiting and hiring practices, to ensure that we’re bringing in strong engineers who are the right fit for our team.
This role reports to the Co-founder/CTO, who you’ll partner with on initiatives across the company.
Responsibilities Include:
- Manage engineering managers to help them increase their impact and that of their teams over time. This includes providing mentorship and guidance, developing their skillsets as managers, providing continuous feedback to help them grow, setting the right expectations and holding them accountable.
- Drive engineering processes and initiatives across the team to help maintain high standards, increase our development velocity, and adapt as our team and needs change over time.
- Foster a positive engineering culture of collaboration, continuous feedback and improvement, and high responsibility and accountability.
- Collaborate with leads across the company (in product, design, data, and operations) to ensure we’re executing well on projects and that we have the right engineering resources staffed to them.
- Keep the level of execution of our engineering team high, with best practices around testing, code quality, security, and automation to help reduce errors and maintenance costs.
- Partner with our CTO in guiding our technical direction and effectively translating that into how we execute across the engineering team.
- Manage our recruiting and hiring processes for engineering as we grow the team as needed.
Ideal Candidates:
- 10+ years of experience, including multiple years of successfully managing and mentoring engineering managers.
- Represents our company values well – serving the long-term Democratic movement, taking ownership, staying humble, operating with autonomy, and focusing on technical solutions to complex problems at scale.
- Experience in leading teams that deliver high quality products to users, which are scalable, reliable, secure, and heavily adaptable as needs change.
- Strong communicator and collaborator who can partner across different functions and understand their needs while representing engineering’s needs.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and flexible to change as the company grows and priorities shift over time.
- Knowledge of the technical stack that we use, including Python, JavaScript, and services in AWS and GCP, isn’t required but a plus.
- Experience working in the political tech ecosystem or tech-driven startups isn’t required but a plus.
Compensation
- $215k-$240k annual salary and an equity grant depending on experience
- Switchboard covers 100% of health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and 75% for dependents
- Employer-provided long-term disability and life insurance
- 21 days of paid time off plus federal holidays
- Unlimited sick leave
- 12 weeks paid parental leave for parents of any gender, including adoptive parents
- 401(K) match with immediate vesting
Diversity
We believe the best products and companies are built by diverse teams where everyone’s perspectives are heard and respected. We strongly encourage people of color, LGBTQ+, women, and members of other underrepresented groups to apply. Even if you’re not sure if the role is a good fit, please apply! We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities in the hiring process and on the job.
Candidates must be authorized to work in the US. We're unable to sponsor work visas at this time.