Staff Engineer, Digital Democracy

CalMatters/The Markup seeks an experienced Staff Engineer who wants to use their skills to strengthen democracy and make a real difference in people’s lives.

TheDigital Democracy project at CalMatters is one of the nation’s most advanced applications of artificial intelligence to civic technology. Our platform uses AI and data engineering to make state legislatures more searchable, understandable, and accountable. We started in California, expanded to include Hawaii, and now we’re looking for a senior engineer to help us grow across the country.

Reporting to our Engineering Manager, this team member will work closely with other Digital Democracy staff to define the architecture of systems that ingest, process, index, and expose large volumes of legislative information. You’ll guide foundational technical decisions that shape the future of Digital Democracy as we scale to new states, new datasets, and new products.

Ideal candidates for this role should enjoy operating at both the strategic and tactical levels: designing systems, reviewing architecture, mentoring engineers, and diving deep into implementation.

What You’ll Do:

• Design and evolve distributed systems that ingest and process government data from diverse sources.
• Design scalable data processing pipelines for transforming raw legislative data into structured, searchable information.
• Build and maintain robust APIs and infrastructure that power public-facing applications, partner integrations, and AI-powered experiences.
• Serve as a technical leader and mentor to Digital Democracy engineers.
• Improve system reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Improve content discovery via search and conversational interfaces.
• Partner with external organizations to integrate their technology and data pipelines with ours.

What We’re Looking For:

• Significant experience operating in senior engineering roles, including experience operating at the Staff Engineer level or equivalent.
• Deep expertise in systems design, database design, and software architecture.
• Demonstrated success designing and evolving complex, data-intensive systems.
• Extensive experience with Elasticsearch, including:
  • Data modeling and index design
  • Query optimization and relevance tuning
  • Scaling search infrastructure in production environments
• Hands-on experience designing and operating cloud-based production systems including CDN configuration, application and data caching, load balancing, queue-based architectures, monitoring and alerting, and building highly available services that can scale under changing workloads.
• Experience designing and implementing APIs used by internal teams, external partners, and public consumers.
• Experience working in small teams where engineers wear multiple hats.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled applications, retrieval systems, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures.
• Expertise with our tech stack that includes:
  • AWS
  • Cloudflare
  • MySQL
  • Python

This full-time position with benefits is based in California and represented by the Pacific Media Workers Guild. This role is remote and requires occasional travel to our Sacramento office and to San Luis Obispo, where Digital Democracy was developed and where some on the team are based. Our preference is for you to live in California, but we will consider other U.S.-based candidates.

Compensation And Benefits

The salary range for this position is $140,000 to $150,000 per year. We offer a complete benefits package with medical, dental and vision insurance — we cover 95% of the cost for employees and dependents — from a range of HMO and PPO providers. We offer a 401(k) match program and provide life insurance at no cost.

The salary range above is our best estimate, in good faith, of what we expect to pay for this position. Our final salary figure will take into account the candidate’s experience and skills, as well as our commitment to pay our staff equitably.

How To Apply

CalMatters is committed to becoming an antiracist organization. We are an expanding and collaborative newsroom, successfully forging a new model for sustainable, intelligent, nonprofit journalism. We do our best to center justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in all that we do—of which hiring is just one part. We encourage you to ask us about what concrete steps we are taking in service of these ideals. We strongly encourage applicants who are people of color, LGBTQ, and people with disabilities, regardless of national origin, alienage, and/or former incarceration status.

If you’re interested, provide a resume, work samples and a cover letter below. In your cover letter, using your own words, let us know how you would approach this role.

Please do not contact the hiring manager directly, and do not send resumés to staff at their individual email addresses. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, don’t hesitate to contact jobs [at] calmatters.org.

About CalMatters | The Markup

CalMatters, now in its eleventh year, is an award-winning nonprofit, nonpartisan news venture dedicated to explaining the policy and politics of America’s biggest state and the world’s fifth largest economy. In 2024, we merged with The Markup, a nonprofit national news publication that challenges technology to serve the public good.

We produce vivid, original multimedia journalism, data-driven news analyses and watchdog accountability reporting on calmatters.org and themarkup.org, and we distribute our work at no cost to more than 250 media partners. Our success metric isn’t clicks — it’s impact. Products at CalMatters/The Markup serve millions of people. For example:

• More than 1 in 5 California voters head to the pollsinformed by CalMatters’ nonpartisan Voter Guide.
• Blacklight, our real-time privacy inspector, has been used over 18 million times and helped journalists, nonprofits, and academicshold tech accountable.
• Digital Democracy, our unprecedented, custom-built AI tool that tracks everything you’d want to know about state legislators hasunearthed stories and prompted legislators to call for change.

We also have the most diverse major newsroom in California. Here you’ll be working alongside dozens of experienced journalists in a supportive, collaborative atmosphere.