Staff Technologist

We’re looking for a Staff Technologist!

Worth Rises seeks a Staff Technologist (exempt), working remotely, to build and maintain the technical infrastructure behind our public-facing research tools and technology solutions that bring our thought leadership and new functionalities to policymakers, journalists, organizers, and impacted people. The Staff Technologist will own the systems that power our public-facing technology, execute and advise on technical strategy for new tools, and coordinate with external technology partners to expand what our small but mighty research team can do. This role reports to the Director of Research & Data Innovation and works cross-functionally with our Advocacy and Narrative teams.

Worth Rises is a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches. Partnering with directly impacted people, we work to expose the commercialization of the criminal legal system and organize and advocate to protect the economic resources extracted from affected communities and strip the prison industry of its power.

Key Results (Year One)

• Scrape and transform the data collection behind our key databases, namely our Corporate Database and National Phone Rate Map to stabilize and manage regular updates.
• Launch Open Connect, our free correctional communications platform, and actively steward the platform for use by correctional agencies across the country.
• Build and maintain a new Correctional Medical Malpractice Map as a publicly accessible AI-powered, documenting legal claims arising from inadequate healthcare at facilities contracting with private correctional healthcare providers.
• Develop an internal dashboard that facilitates our advocacy campaigns, conducts social listening about the prison industry, analyzes our digital media, and tracks our impact metrics.

Major Responsibilities

• Co-develop the organization’s technology strategy with the Executive Director, Chief Narrative Officer, and Director of Research & Data Innovation.
• Execute the organization’s technology strategy, auditing, refining, and building the organization’s portfolio of technology-based research tools and industry solutions.
• Surface relevant technical learning resources, tools, and collaboration opportunities to the Director of Research & Data Innovation to inform day-to-day work and longer-term projects.
• Source, scope, and coordinate internal and external collaborators across all technical projects.
• Create documentation, including well-structured READMEs, clear docstrings, and data dictionaries, that make tech tools and solutions legible to colleagues and future maintainers.
• Other project specific responsibilities
  • Open Connect, our free correctional communication software
    • Serve as the in-house technical lead for Open Connect, coordinating the development of the platform with the support of external developers, fellows, and contractors.
    • Assess the existing codebase, identify gaps, and contribute code directly where needed to move the project toward deployment.
    • Steward completed platform to conduct agency pilots, ensuring adaptability to specific needs, collecting feedback from all stakeholders, and refining code for full launch.
  • Correctional Medical Malpractice Map
    • Serve as in-house technical lead and principal builder, coordinating with external technologists as necessary .
    • Support the build through launch, collecting feedback from a small set of advisors, and own ongoing maintenance.
  • Connect Families Now Telecom Map (connectfamiliesnow.com/data)
    • Own the data pipeline including scraper maintenance, cleaning and transformation, and monthly publishing to the site and GitHub.
    • Run validations in close collaboration with the Director of Research & Data Innovation.
  • Corporate Database (worthrises.org/data)
    • Stabilize and automate the corporate database updates and maintenance, including the Airtable and GitHub infrastructure.
  • Internal dashboard
    • Connect with Advocacy, Narrative, and Operations teams to understand their needs and scope an internal dashboard.
    • Build and maintain an internal dashboard that can both support day-to-day activities (e.g. legislative bill tracking, social listening, etc.) and track our organizational goals and impact metrics.
• Support the Director of Finance & Operations in developing the organization’s internal technology strategy, such as policies and protocols around cyber security and AI-use.
• Support the Digital Associate with ad hoc website development needs.

Critical Factors for Success
This role requires a motivated self-starter who takes initiative, consistently delivers high-quality work, is an excellent project manager, is a proactive and innovative problem-solver, appreciates direct feedback, and has the following:

• At least five years of experience as an engineer or developer with a portfolio of tech tools and solutions built from scratch, including at least one example of a shipped public-facing tool, map, or data product that demonstrates attention to usability for non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to bridge technical and non-technical contexts; able to assess a codebase, identify what matters, and communicate trade-offs clearly to colleagues without a technical background.
• Proficiency in Python for data work, with working knowledge of libraries like pandas for data transformation, scraping tools such as BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, or Playwright for sites that require browser automation.
• Experience calling and working with external APIs, including LLM APIs and geocodingm for structured data extraction and transformation.
• Experience with Airtable, with the ability to evaluate when to use which and migrate to other no-code/low-code platforms.
• Familiarity with data validation and normalization techniques, including entity resolution and record linkage for matching messy records across sources (e.g., variations of the same corporate name or facility); experience with libraries like fuzzywuzzy, dedupe, or recordlinkage is a plus.
• Experience scheduling and automating recurring data jobs using GitHub Actions or comparable CI/CD tooling, and comfort with containerized deployment environments (Docker, AWS ECS/Fargate, or equivalent) sufficient to run, update, and monitor a production pipeline.
• Comfort extracting data from non-standard sources, ideally including PDFs (using tools like pdfplumber or tabula-py) and scanned documents.
• Precision and care across every step of the data pipeline, from scraping through publishing, with an understanding that journalists, policymakers, organizers, and impacted families rely on the credibility of our public-facing tools.
• Strong project management skills, technical judgment, and the ability to scope realistically — knowing when to build, when to outsource, and when to push back on a project's scope.
• Strong instinct for usability — what makes a public-facing tool clear, intuitive, and trustworthy for a non-technical user landing on it cold.
• Genuine commitment to our organizational values: act with integrity, focus on impact, deliver excellence, get it done, and operate with intellectual curiosity (visit worthrises.org/jointhefight).

Compensation and Benefits
The annual salary for the Staff Technologist is $104,000. Worth Rises offers a generous compensation package, including comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, 20 days of vacation time, ten days of personal/sick leave, and three days of bereavement leave in addition to 11 holidays and winter break. Employees also receive a generous 401k contribution match, $75 monthly technology stipend, monthly wellness reimbursement, and dedicated budget for professional development. Finally, we offer retention benefits every five years. We currently operate in a remote-first environment with office options and an on-video culture.

Worth Rises is an equal opportunity employer, and strongly encourages formerly incarcerated individuals, directly impacted individuals, people of color, members of the disabled community, gender-variant and non-binary individuals, and other members of the LGBTQIA+ community to apply.