Full-time. Company is based in Austin, TX but remote is welcome.
Overview
Unified is seeking a Senior Data Engineer that can contribute to continued development of our internal API and assist with performance scaling and observability of our infrastructure. The Senior Data Engineer will join a 6-9 person engineering team and be supported by a Lead Data Scientist.
About the company
Unified is the social network for activism. Our platform provides a comprehensive organizing toolkit within a fully-featured social networking app to allow organizers and activists to build vibrant, action-driven communities committed to bettering the world around them.
We’re currently in public beta and have over 2,000 activists on the platform. We have interest from over 700 advocacy, non-profit, and political organizations from across the country and plan to onboard these groups and over 100,000 of their members by the end of the year.
Our current focus is on providing a platform that supports the following broad use cases:
- Easy discovery of activists focusing on issues you’re interested in.
- Connecting with those activists via social feeds, following profiles, and private chats.
- Growing an activist’s community through a variety of acquisition and engagement tools.
- Helping activists raise money to support their efforts.
Over time, we plan to support a variety of specific activism needs through a wide mix of product features, including the following use cases that have been raised by interested groups:
- Coordinate delegates during a national political convention
- Mobilizing Gen-Z activists in Wisconsin
- Running for mayor of Houston
- Promoting the social justice work of podcast guests
- Recruiting candidates to run for office
- Unionizing workplaces
- Coordinating volunteer activity for a sorority
- …and many more
Our ambition is to build a platform and company that supports millions of activists across the US and eventually the world.
About the product
Unified is currently available through mobile and web applications. Both currently or will eventually support the following features:
- An algorithmically-ranked public social media feed where users can post and share content
- Private chat groups where specific groups can coordinate within their own communities
- Search and discovery for users and trending topics across the platform
- Matching users’ contacts against a voter file to check for voter registration status
- Matching users with their elected officials based on their address
- Event creation and RSVPs, along with discovery of events based on location and personal interest
- Donation and related payment processing to support fundraising
- Customer dashboards and analytics to help organizations make data-driven decisions for community growth, fundraising, and voter engagement
Along with these user-facing features, we want to understand user behavior through logging and internal analytics so we can build better products for those users. Our databases and data pipelines are integral to supporting all of these systems.
Responsibilities
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will help implement scale our data infrastructure to support product features, AI/ML workflows, and analytics and business intelligence systems critical to our decision making and success. Specific responsibilities include:
- Design, implement, and maintain high volume data pipelines across the application stack
- Manage and scale relational, document and search data stores to support rapid growth.
- Support streaming data and event-based data pipelines.
- Manage and create feature stores that enable rapid ML experimentation and deployment
- Support machine learning workflows, including feature engineering, model training pipelines, and model deployment.
- Implement ML Ops practices such as model versioning, monitoring, retraining, and CI/CD for ML models.
- Build and maintain business intelligence dashboards and data pipelines for both internal use and for our organization customers.
- Ensure best practices for data governance, quality, and security.
Requirements
As a member of the Unified team, you can expect to engage with a set of individuals who are incredibly committed to their company’s mission. All Unified team members fundamentally believe in the potential impact of our work on society. That means we expect a lot from each other and those we work with. In practice, this means we look for the following attributes in all of our employees:
- Defaults to action in everything they do
- Very organized and highly effective in terms of time management
- Extreme attention to detail
- Highly responsive to other team members’ requests
- Takes time to learn new tools or best practices when necessary
- Listens to others and seeks out feedback from team members and third parties
- Is very engaged in understanding the organizations and individuals whom we serve
Specific technical skills that will be helpful in this role include:
- Programming Languages: Proficiency in Python (including Pandas, Polars) and SQL; familiarity with JavaScript preferred.
- Datastores: Experience optimizing document and relational datastores. PostgreSQL required. MongoDB, Redis and Elasticsearch are a plus.
- Data Warehouse: Familiarity with BigQuery, Redshift or Snowflake or similar as well as data processing frameworks such as Spark and Scala
- Workflow Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Apache Airflow, Kafka, AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions, Prefect, Temporal, or similar scheduling/pub-sub/orchestration tools.
- ML Ops: Familiarity with tools/frameworks for machine learning pipelines (e.g., Ray, MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI).
- Infrastructure: Experience with distributed systems, including Docker and Kubernetes for containerization and deployment.
What this role offers
We want to build a team of passionate, experienced individuals that are driven to better the world around them. We want to work with others who have the same drive. To foster this, we work hard to offer a supportive work environment where team members feel a shared purpose, bond with one another, and are compensated competitively.
- Salary: $140,000 - $160,000 per year
- Equity: Employee options on a 4 year vesting schedule, 1 year cliff
- Retirement: 100% matching on first 3% and 50% matching on next 2% of pay toward 401K
- Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance coverage
- Time off: Two week minimum vacation
- Additional perks: Healthy eating incentive. ChatGPT reimbursement. Travel to Austin, TX at least once per year.
How to apply
Submit your information here: https://airtable.com/appvg1UAQgKCzR0Xl/pagj1kyfmXMRJ1mJA/form