Software Architect

Who We Are

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

About the Position

Do you see yourself as a mission-driven systems thinker who loves to build products that make a difference at scale? Do you thrive in inclusive and thoughtful environments with leaders who empower you to influence how an organization learns, grows, and delivers impact? We at Murmuration are seeking a Software Architect to act as a force multiplier for our engineering organization to help us build the future of civic tech.

Murmuration builds technology that helps our partner organizations strengthen civic engagement and organize more effectively in their communities. Our products weave together data (engagement, outreach, demographic, and voter data) and software applications that help partners better understand and organize outreach among the people they serve. Our team is intentionally multidisciplinary and partner-focused. We succeed together by aligning planning, execution, and learnings from engineering, product, design, research, data, and partner success teams. We build complex, data-driven systems, CRM-style apps, and communication channels that need to work reliably during critical moments, scale as our partners grow, and remain understandable and maintainable as communities and their needs evolve.

As a Software Architect, you will be one of Murmuration’s most senior individual contributors and a key technical leader across the organization. You will have the opportunity to partner with senior leadership to solve Murmuration's hardest and most ambiguous technical challenges. In this non-management role, you will lead through influence and apply your deep technical expertise and strong judgment, and take a pragmatic, hands-on approach grounded in partner needs and real-world system behavior. Your work will bridge business strategy with technical execution to design and evolve how Murmuration builds software and supports our partners. This includes architectural standards, technical decision-making frameworks, and cross-team alignment mechanisms that improve velocity, quality, and long-term systems health.

This role is organizational in scope and may require contributing directly when doing so helps teams move forward. You will drive decisions across multiple teams by clarifying tradeoffs, identifying risks, and helping the organization move ahead even when the path is not fully certain. You will partner closely with engineering managers, tech leads, product, and design leaders to ensure technical plans align with user needs, reduce friction in delivering value, and support Murmuration’s long-term mission. You will help the organization make better technical decisions, faster, while raising the bar for rigor, clarity, and accountability.

This role offers the opportunity to shape Murmuration's long-term technical and leadership trajectory, elevate engineering effectiveness across teams, and make impact on the future of our products, data, and systems which empower our communities.

Job Level: P7

Requirements:
What You Need to Succeed:

• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, high-leverage problem spaces where influence matters more than authority
• Strong systems thinking, end-to-end perspective, and architectural judgement, with a clear instinct for second-order effects (anticipating long-term, indirect consequences of technical and architectural decisions)
• Exceptional communication skills, particularly in facilitating complex technical trade-offs among senior engineers and leaders
• Effective engagement with exec stakeholders to translate engineering constraints, risks, and opportunities into product and business context, and ability to translate business priorities into technical strategy
• Coaching mindset and a genuine desire to uplevel others via mentorship/sponsorship, design review, and lived example
• Be like Ted Lasso: Believe. Build trust. Demonstrate: Kindness, empathy, optimism, curiosity, and vulnerability. Lift up the team
• Bias toward action, focus on outcomes vs outputs, model "good enough" vs perfection, build durable solutions that improve how teams work not just what they ship
• Ability to synthesize multi-faceted problems into strategic roadmaps, prioritize, estimate technical complexity, composition/timelines for milestones, identify gaps and glue with a mindset toward improving reliability, scalability, performance, cost-to-serve, development velocity, operational stability, and long-term sustainability
• Ability and motivation to deeply understand customer needs, design patterns, and actual customer usage across systems to uplevel hand-offs between teams and delight users

What You Bring to the Table:

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with sustained impact as a senior tech leader (Staff+, Principal, Architect, or equivalent)
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct people management
• Experience leading architectural evolution or transformation in established organizations, particularly at the intersection of technology and organizational structure
• Strong architectural judgment across system design, scalability, reliability, and performance trade-offs
• Experience establishing or evolving technical decision-making mechanisms (design reviews, architecture forums, decision records)
• Track record of modeling high standards for technical design quality, documentation, and peer review
• Executive-level communication skills, with experience representing senior IC perspectives in engineering leadership or executive forums

Technical Expertise:

• Expert-level understanding of database systems and cloud-native architectures (e.g. AWS Lambda, Fargate, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions)
• Deep experience with modern cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure) and Kubernetes-based infrastructure is preferred
• Strong knowledge of OLAP/OLTP relational (SQL) and document (NoSQL) data storage systems and expertise scaling them (e.g. MongoDB, Apache Pinot, Snowflake, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch, Solr)
• Proficiency with modern development practices, including CI/CD and DevOps methodologies
• Hands-on experience with at least one major backend language (e.g. Java, node/TypeScript, Python, Rust) and strong familiarity with a second
• Extensive knowledge in software architecture patterns (microservices, service-oriented, event-driven) and stellar engineering practices
• Familiarity:
• Hands-on experience with some BE technologies: Rest/GraphQL
• Queues (AWS SQS, Kafka, Pusher, SNS)
• Orchestration (Airflow)
• Monitoring/Observability (CloudWatch, DataDog)
• Foundational knowledge of security best practices and compliance implications
• Frontend language (e.g. JavaScript, TypeScript)
• Frontend frameworks (React, Angular)
• Experience with civic assets (voter data, polling, constituent modeling)

Talented Software Architects 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!

Benefits:
Location and Compensation

The Software Architect is a full-time, salaried position with a comprehensive benefits package (detail below), open to candidates anywhere in the United States.

The starting salary for this position is $296,965. We set compensation using market data and apply it consistently across the organization to ensure fairness and transparency for everyone in similar roles.

Our Culture of Care

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:

• Health, vision, and dental insurance with 100% of premiums covered for you and qualifying family members;
• Retirement benefits with a 5% employer match;
• A flexible unlimited PTO plan;
• Generous paid parental leave;
• Pre-tax commuter benefits;
• A company laptop;
• A flexible remote work environment;
• A home office setup stipend for all new employees;
• Monthly reimbursement for remote work expenses;
• A yearly professional development fund;
• Mental health and wellness benefits through Calm and Better Help;
• Yearly in-person staff retreats; and
• A welcoming culture that celebrates diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

At Murmuration, we believe a vibrant, representative democracy depends on the inclusion of diverse voices