Senior Engineering Manager at Murmuration

United States

<p>Who We Are</p><p>At 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.</p><p>We 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.</p><p>We envision an America where every community has what it needs to help people lead healthy, free, 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.</p><p>We 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.</p><p>We'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.</p><p></p><p>About the Position</p><p>Do you see yourself as a mission-driven Senior Engineering Manager who believes that great products emerge from strong teams? Do you have a curiosity and passion for bringing related areas together and coaching people of different backgrounds and technical expertise into a cohesive, collaborative team? Do you thrive in inclusive, thoughtful environments where engineers hold themselves to high standards of technical excellence, ownership, and impact at scale? </p><p>The Murmuration Engineering Team is seeking an experienced Senior Engineering Manager to grow and develop the multidisciplinary team (DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps) that builds and maintains the shared systems that all of our teams depend on. Your guidance and influence on this team will raise the bar across the engineering organization. </p><p>Murmuration 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 into 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.</p><p><br />As a Senior Engineering Manager, you'll join the Platform Team to support both production and prototype applications and the services they're built upon. You'll coach and grow a small, cross-discipline team that owns the outcomes for the org's build/deploy/run systems, with accountability for other teams' ability to ship fast, safely, and reliably. The team’s disciplines span DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps domains.</p><p>Your leadership actively shapes the team's operating model, evolving it to serve the Engineering organization's current and future needs. Your strategic thinking turns vision into sequenced deliverables and adapts as priorities shift without losing sight of where the team is headed. Your commitment to high-quality documentation improves knowledge sharing, onboarding, and long-term product maintainability across Murmuration. </p><p>Your ability to work across engineering teams, understanding their goals and shaping the org's engineering roadmap around them, is key to making the Platform Team successful.</p><p>This role suits a deeply experienced Senior Engineering Manager who can evaluate where we are today, absorb shifts in direction, and keep us on track. Your commitment to building inclusive, high-trust, high-performing teams is visible across the technology organization. And you believe, as we do, that how we build is just as important as what we build.</p><p></p><p>Job Level: M4</p><p></p><p>Drive &amp; Model</p><ul><li>Shape technical strategy for the team: Build an engineering roadmap that keeps the team focused on big-picture objectives and that reflects tradeoffs among competing priorities, dependencies, and complexities across DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps. Propose clear recommendations and plans, and present well-reasoned documentation of tradeoffs and alternatives.</li><li>Manage technical debt and process health: Maintain a steady cadence of debt paydown, prioritizing which debt to tackle and communicating the reasoning behind those choices. Own the schedule of dependency and application updates so end-of-life deadlines are handled proactively rather than as last-minute fire drills.</li><li>Deliver production-ready platforms: Own the platforms and tooling that give other teams a stable, observable foundation of reliability, performance, and operational excellence so they can focus on building and testing their own applications on top of it.</li><li>Strengthen application security: Introspect codebases to identify vulnerabilities early, and own data privacy and access control as first-class concerns; deliver solutions that support secure coding practices across the org without owning how other teams write their code.</li><li>Enable FinOps visibility: Build and own the single panes of glass that give engineering leadership and the C-suite a clear, trusted view of cloud and infrastructure costs, supporting both short-term budget decisions and long-term cost strategy.</li><li>Architect for the long term: Design and build systems and architectures that will serve Murmuration for years with scale, reliability, security, and maintainability as first-class concerns.</li></ul><p></p><p>Elevate the Team</p><ul><li>Coach and empower emerging leaders: Coach leaders to lead at every level: Within their own teams, as good, collaborative, and experienced peers, and through mentoring ICs around them.</li><li>Resolve ambiguity: Actively shape and bring structure and clarity (not perfection) to specs.</li><li>Listen and elevate: Stay closely attuned to how other teams approach test strategy, code quality, and system design, and use that insight to ensure that what our team builds and delivers elevates their developer journey.</li><li>Be like Ted Lasso: Believe, coach the whole team, build trust, and demonstrate kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability.</li></ul><p></p><p>Lead Beyond Platform</p><ul><li>Lead beyond the Platform team: Own objectives that span multiple teams and align with division and organizational goals.</li><li>Be the voice: Lead with ownership and accountability on behalf of DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps; seek opportunities to add clarity, make high-quality recommendations, and be a decision-maker in discussions with product and leadership.</li><li>Identify risk: Identify, document, and follow-up in a timely manner on vulnerabilities and operational risk across the full platform, including applications built by other teams.</li><li>Lead incident response: Involve the right people across DevOps, App Security, SRE and FinOps, lead the response, conduct root cause analysis, and follow through until learnings are shared, incorporated, and remediation is complete.</li></ul><p></p><p>Build with Vision</p><ul><li>Build one internal engineering system, not four Platform teams: Treat DevOps, App Security, SRE, and FinOps as interdependent subsystems where the outcome depends on how well they integrate, not how well each performs alone.</li><li>Present a cohesive voice and narrative externally: Lead with expertise and a cohesive single voice about the Platform Team’s mission and deliverables to our peer teams.</li><li>Be curious about people, not just systems: Identify opportunities to foster curiosity and ease communication between people who come from different backgrounds, experiences, and technical lenses.</li><li>Use AI to amplify: Surface risks and gaps that manual review would miss, and measure team progress together towards shared goals.</li></ul> <p>Technical Depth and Judgement</p><ul><li>Deep, hands-on expertise across DevOps and SRE: Your direct prior experience informs your approach to prioritizing competing work, communicating tradeoffs clearly, and explaining how a decision in DevOps, SRE, AppSec, or FinOps supports the organization as a whole.</li><li>Sound judgment under imperfect information: Make tradeoff calls to generate clarity in ambiguous situations.</li><li>Communicates effectively: Explain to non-technical leadership why an architecture decision is sound without needing the original author in the room.</li><li>Champions team decisions: Advocate for the team's technical decisions to peers, product, and leadership.</li></ul><p></p><p>Scope, Initiative, and Execution </p><ul><li>Lead execution at scale: Lead technical execution for initiatives spanning multiple teams or systems, balancing quality, performance, and cost while keeping stakeholders aligned on tradeoffs and risks.</li><li>Turn strategy into shipped deliverables: Translate objectives aligned with division and organizational goals into clear epics, stories, and tickets, anticipating technical challenges and proposing solutions before they become blockers.</li><li>Plan through ambiguity: Estimate large, cross-team projects with unknowns, building mitigation plans for what’s unresolved, and breaking work into milestones and iterations to reduce risk and deliver incremental value.</li><li>Drive to completion: Involve decision makers, delegate clearly, communicate consistently, and follow through as an owner, in a timely manner, until an outcome is delivered.</li><li>Multiply team effectiveness: Use technical leadership, tooling, infrastructure, and process improvements to multiply the impact of both the Platform Team and the Engineering organization.</li></ul><p></p><p>Organizational Impact</p><ul><li>Influence beyond the team: Shape outcomes beyond your own team through role modeling, documentation, and advocacy.</li><li>Mentor future leaders: Develop future technical leaders, building their judgment, ownership, and skills through 1:1 guidance and small-group knowledge sharing.</li><li>Raise the engineering bar: Drive the standards and best practices that raise the bar across the organization, creating processes that instill ownership behavior in others.</li><li>Lead by example: Proactively share context and learnings with an eye to creating the kind of high-trust, high-performing team culture that makes everyone better.</li></ul><p></p><p>What You Bring to the Table</p><p>Foundations</p><ul><li>10+ years of professional software manager engineering experience with demonstrated fluency across infrastructure, systems, and application layers, and a track record of delivering in production across a variety of languages, tools, and technology stacks.</li><li>A quality-driven mindset with experience writing, maintaining, and driving infrastructure and deployment safety checks at the team or product level.</li><li>A track record of effective collaboration with product, data science, and R&amp;D teams, bridging technical and domain-specific perspectives across disciplines.</li></ul><p></p><p>DevOps</p><ul><li>Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and release engineering practices.</li><li>Production experience with AWS, including compute, storage, and networking services.</li><li>Proficiency with Docker, Make, or similar build tools, as well as environment scripting.</li><li>Fluency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) across AWS, GCP, and Azure providers sufficient to evaluate design decisions, not just approve them.</li></ul><p></p><p>App Security</p><ul><li>Experience driving secure coding practices, data privacy principles, and access control patterns as applied in production systems.</li><li>Familiarity with security practices such as vulnerability scanning, secrets management, and secure SDLC.</li><li>Knowledge of compliance and regulatory frameworks (e.g., SOC 2, NIST CSF) and how they shape engineering decisions.</li></ul><p>SRE</p><ul><li>Deep experience with cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and production-grade software at scale.</li><li>Direct experience with observability tooling (logging, metrics, and tracing) using tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, or Grafana.</li><li>Working knowledge of incident management practices: On-call rotations, escalation, and postmortem processes.</li></ul><p></p><p>FinOps</p><ul><li>Familiarity with cloud cost and billing platforms sufficient to build tooling that supports both short- and long-term budget decisions.</li></ul><p></p><p>Nice to Haves</p><ul><li>Familiarity with Voter File Data;</li><li>Experience with or interest in political data; and/or</li><li>A background in political tech, civic tech, advocacy, or mission-driven organizations.</li></ul><p></p><p>Talented Senior Engineering Managers come from all walks of life and career. If you are passionate about civic engagement and technology, please apply, even if you do not check every box!</p> <p>Location and Compensation</p><p>This is a full-time, salaried position with a comprehensive benefits package, open</p><p>to candidates anywhere in the United States. </p><p>The starting salary for this position is $228,497. We set compensation using market data and apply it consistently across the organization to ensure fairness and transparency for everyone in similar roles. </p><p></p><p>Our Culture of Care</p><p>We work hard to create a culture of care to ensure that our staff are best equipped to lead happy, healthy, and balanced lives. To that end, we offer a comprehensive benefits package which includes:</p><ul><li>Health, vision, and dental insurance with 100% of premiums covered for you and qualifying family members;</li><li>Retirement benefits with a 5% employer match;</li><li>A flexible unlimited PTO plan;</li><li>Generous paid parental leave;</li><li>Pre-tax commuter benefits;</li><li>A company laptop;</li><li>A flexible remote work environment;</li><li>A home office setup stipend for all new employees;</li><li>Monthly reimbursement for remote work expenses;</li><li>A yearly professional development fund;</li><li>Mental health and wellness benefits through Calm and Better Help; </li><li>Yearly in-person staff retreats; and</li><li>A welcoming culture that celebrates diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.</li></ul><p></p><p>At Murmuration, we believe a vibrant, representative democracy depends on the inclusion of diverse voices, lived experiences, and perspectives. The best ideas don’t come from a single person or ideology — they emerge at the intersection of different backgrounds, identities, and viewpoints. We are proud of our commitment to building an organization and culture shaped by respect, empathy, and collaboration, where our team’s diversity fuels innovation, civic engagement, and meaningful change. We welcome new colleagues who will help us nurture this collective effort. Join us.</p><p></p><p>An Equal-Opportunity Employer with a Commitment to Diversity</p><p>Murmuration is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and as an organization committed to diversity and the perspective of all voices, we consider applicants equally of race, gender, color, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, disability, political affiliation and national origin. We reasonably accommodate staff members and/or applicants with disabilities, provided they are otherwise able to perform the essential functions of the job.</p><p>Note: Murmuration is two organizations working together to pursue our mission of amplifying the power of civic engagement: Murmuration Research Institute, a 501(c)(3) that conducts research to identify, design, and create the data, tools, and insights that build healthier and more equitable communities; and Murmuration, Inc., a 501(c)(4) that supports organizations working across the country on the nation’s most challenging issues with access to data, tools, and research that build healthier and more equitable communities.</p>