Staff SDET

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 build power and 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 an engineer with deep roots in software and data engineering who is passionate about data quality - and ready to build the systems that prove it?

As a Staff Software Development Engineer in Testing (SDET), you will embed in our Data Platform team as its senior-most testing authority, responsible for developing a deep understanding of our entire data platform and then designing and driving the implementation of the Organizer product's automated integration testing strategy. This role is built for someone who is first and foremost a strong engineer - with substantial experience in software development and/or data engineering - and who brings a genuine passion for data quality and testing as a craft.

This is a great opportunity to build something with significant impact from the ground up. You will be expected to quickly achieve mastery of our streaming data pipelines and distributed systems architecture, and then have the creative latitude to design and implement a comprehensive end-to-end test framework - with real organizational investment and impact behind it. You will influence testing strategy organization-wide, set technical standards, and serve as a force multiplier for the engineers around you.

Job Level: P5

What You'll Do

• Rapidly develop a comprehensive understanding of our entire data platform (its architecture, data flows, business logic, and system interdependencies) to serve as the foundation for a testing strategy;
• Work with our application QA Engineering Team to understand our existing testing strategy and tools; this will help you identify how you can fill the gaps in data testing;
• Design, architect, and lead the implementation of an integration testing framework for the Organizer application's streaming data platform, ensuring it is complementary to existing infrastructure;
• Design automated validations that query and compare data across multiple storage systems (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB, Pinot) to ensure end-to-end data correctness;
• Embed automated tests within CI/CD pipelines to establish regression baselines and continuously validate new feature development;
• Design tests that rigorously account for eventual consistency, asynchronous processing, and time-based behaviors inherent to distributed systems;
• Define and own the long-term quality and testing strategy for the data platform, aligning it with organizational reliability, observability, and engineering excellence goals;
• Evaluate, select, and integrate tools, frameworks, and technologies to advance automation and data validation capabilities across the organization;
• Implement automated performance and throughput benchmarks for critical pipeline components and own the standards by which results are evaluated;
• Participate in engineering design reviews with a quality-first lens, ensuring testability, observability, and data correctness are built into systems from the start;
• Proactively identify, investigate, and drive resolution of data quality issues and systemic reliability risks; collaborate with data engineers to implement fixes and preventative measures;
• Lead post-incident reviews for data quality events: authoring clear timelines, facilitating root cause analysis, and driving follow-through on remediation action items;
• Mentor engineers across the data platform and QA teams, establishing testing best practices and elevating the team's overall quality culture; and
• Represent the data platform's quality posture in cross-functional technical discussions and influence engineering standards across teams.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or SDET roles, with a track record that demonstrates strong software development fundamentals;
• Deep proficiency in Python (or equivalent programming language) and experience writing production-quality, maintainable code;
• Demonstrated experience designing and architecting complex test frameworks or automation systems with strong, well-reasoned opinions about how to do it well;
• Deep experience with streaming data pipelines, event-driven architectures, or distributed data systems (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Flink, or equivalent);
• Strong command of NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB) and relational databases;
• Experience testing or building systems in cloud-native, serverless environments (e.g., EventBridge, Lambda, asynchronous workflows);
• Experience testing GraphQL or REST APIs;
• A genuine passion for testing as a discipline: someone who sees quality engineering as a craft, not a checkbox;
• Demonstrated ability to operate with a high degree of autonomy: to scope ambiguous problems, build a plan, and drive to outcomes independently;
• Proven experience influencing testing or quality strategy across teams or an engineering organization;
• Excellent debugging and analytical skills in complex, distributed, data-intensive environments; and
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to document architecture decisions and present technical approaches to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with Scala and/or JavaScript;
• Experience with performance benchmarking, load testing, or throughput analysis;
• Experience with OLAP data stores (e.g., Pinot, Snowflake);
• Familiarity with AWS (e.g., S3, Lambda, ECS, Lambda) and data orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Kafka, Spark);
• Experience with monitoring/alerting tooling (e.g., Datadog); and
• Familiarity with Playwright.

Talented Engineers 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 Staff Software Development Engineer in Testing is a full-time, salaried position with a comprehensive benefits package (more detail below), open to candidates anywhere in the United States.

The starting salary for this position is $225,324. 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, 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.

An Equal-Opportunity Employer with a Commitment to Diversity

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.

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.