Job Description

Generalist Developer

NGP VAN is the winningest technology platform in the history of democratic and progressive causes, working tirelessly to innovate and advance the technology our clients rely on to bolster our democracy. We help power the trailblazers, campaigners, and advocates fighting for equality, racial justice, reproductive freedom, democracy, climate reform, and more. Our scalable, flexible tools and APIs make us the choice of some of the most tech-savvy progressive organizations using the Internet to fight for good.

The ActionKit team at NGP VAN needs you to help our clients win fights to make the world a better place. ActionKit is used by over 150 organizations to help tens of millions of online supporters contact decision makers, donate money, and take action online and offline. Our clients, from the largest political campaigns to progressive advocacy groups and nonprofits, use our tools to protect immigrant rights, fight climate change and more.

ActionKit is built and maintained by a small, tight-knit team at NGP VAN, the top provider of technology for Democrats and progressives. ActionKit has been around over a decade, and the team has always worked together remotely.

We're looking for a generalist developer who, like the rest of our team, is ready to wear many hats, working on all aspects of ActionKit ranging all the way from development to client support. ActionKit is built on Python, Django, MySQL, Linux, and AWS. If you'd like to use your tech skills to make the world a better place, read on.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• We keep our eyes on the big picture. We prefer giving team members higher-level goals and flexibility rather than micro-managing. You're responsible for the detailed design of your features, not just coding them, and developers often propose feature ideas. Vision is as important a part of the job as execution.
• We all pitch in on a lot of things. All engineers' work touches various parts of the product, support, and operations. Other roles span sales and project management, or database administration and hiring.
• The work isn't over when the code ships. We're proud of the quality and reliability of our product, and our response when there are bugs, pain points, or production issues. Every engineer, including you, takes a shift of at least a few hours each week answering clients' support tickets.
• We appreciate our clients and the work they do: we're in this to make them more effective and make their day-to-day a bit easier, maybe even a little fun.

Essential Functions

• Help develop and maintain ActionKit's codebase, from building brand new features to polishing, debugging, refactoring, or improving the efficiency or reliability of existing code.
• Help shape the direction of the product by proposing ideas, collecting client feedback, and refining broad ideas into concrete plans, both in informal conversation and places like our issue tracker.
• Work directly with clients through our email support system and sometimes other means like joining discovery calls; writing release notes; or participating in ClientCon, our yearly client summit.
• Contribute as needed to other technical functions like operations, tooling, monitoring, performance tuning, and moreall engineers pitch in on these at ActionKit; no one just develops new features.
• Work with teammates to accomplish all of the above (as we'll work to help you!) both by talking with each other day-to-day and through structured channels like code reviews and documentation.

You might not do something under each of these bullets every day, or on day one. But we do think you're better prepared for this job if interested in all aspects of running a product, not only heads-down coding.

Required Minimum Qualifications

• Skills and judgment to produce high-quality work, from attention to detail in coding and testing to big-picture wisdom about risk and simplifying tricky plans.
• Communication and collaboration skills. It's critical to be able to talk through tradeoffs, ask for the information you need to get up to speed, and make your work understandable to others.
• Empathy with others' needs, from coworkers to clients.
• Experience building database-backed web apps, especially using dynamic-language frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django. Adjacent experience will be considered, too.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with (or at) nonprofits or political groups.
• Experience touching multiple aspects of a software business, such as development, design, cloud and database administration, support, releases, QA, sales, and management.
• Experience with one or more of the specific technologies we use. ActionKit is written in Python using the Django framework, backed by a MySQL database, and hosted in AWS.

That said, we aren't judging candidates by a checklist and want anyone up to the job to apply. We come from a variety of backgrounds and would like future hires to as well.

This position is a part of a bargaining union represented by CWA Local 1400, 2336, or 13000.

At this time, we are unable to consider candidates who require current or future sponsorship for employment authorization.

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