BallotReady is searching for a Lead Data Architect to design the blueprints we use for our data management systems and oversee the data that powers our digital products, API, and data solutions. As a result, you’ll join our team in working to mobilize voters and constituents to take action at every level of government.

Who We Are

BallotReady mobilizes constituents to take meaningful civic action, including registering to vote, finding their polling place, researching their ballot, and contacting their elected representatives, and our platform is powered by the most comprehensive database on every level of government.

We’ve worked with organizations such as Snapchat, TikTok, Spotify, and the Miami Heat to reach over 35 million voters. Now we’re gearing up to inform and engage constituents in 2024 and beyond.

What You’ll Do

The Lead Data Architect, who can be based anywhere in the U.S. and will report to the Senior Director of Data Strategy, will leverage their computer science and design skills to review and analyze our data infrastructure, plan future databases, and implement solutions to store and manage data for our user-facing products.

Our data is complex, reflecting the decentralized and idiosyncratic nature of U.S. democracy. Our data sources come in a myriad of formats, gathered from our large team of researchers, and they require a mix of manual and automated ETL processes to fit into our data structures. In this role, you will be designing the structures to house these multiform relationships and power tools to make this data accessible to millions of users nationwide.

In more detail, this role is responsible for the following:

• Drafting data management frameworks to meet business and product requirements
• Understanding complex problems, devising solutions, and transforming them into software and database requirements
• Conducting data research and querying large and complex datasets to provide the best data modeling
• Designing database structures for new tables or fields, using relational database best practices
• Identifying areas of improvement in our database usage, and finding new ways to organize and access data
• Collaborating with our Product Team on designs for new tools or software products to ensure the database interacts appropriately with the designs
• Reviewing and auditing our ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) processes for manual qualitative data gathering projects, including software interfaces, SQL scripts, and API mutations
• Maintaining documentation on how database fields interact with our products and internal tools
• Developing models of our database structure for internal and external informational purposes
• Tracking the health of all our civic data products, including developing automated and manual QA systems

Who You Are

To succeed in this job, you must excel at:

• Relational database design (PostgreSQL preferred)
• Collaboration with Product, Design, and Engineering teams to build data-driven SaaS products
• Agile development practices, particularly conducting work along sprint cycles
• Writing and maintaining documentation on databases and products that interact with them
• Organizing and analyzing geospatial data within a relational database (PostGIS)
• Communicating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

A few items that are plusses, but not requirements for the job:

• Knowledge of civic data, election practices, and BallotReady’s research processes
• Managing and delegating tasks to a small team
• APIs (GraphQL, REST) and software to interact with them (Altair, Postman)
• Coding languages like Python and Java to develop applications
• GIS software (QGIS, ArcGIS)

If you were here today, you’d be:

• Working with a UX designer and software engineer to build a new tool that helps constituents learn about their elected officials and make plans to meet with them, bringing your expertise of how our database works and how the new software should utilize various fields and tables
• Helping us build a new internal tool that streamlines the gathering of candidate names and the positions they’re running for, taking into account data integrity and QA steps
• Identifying answers to employee questions about what value a field should have in a strange edge case they just found. This might start as answering a Slack message and evolve into having a resource where employees can answer questions themselves.
• Supporting our candidate recruitment customers who receive data exports of 200,000+ current officeholders nationwide by building out a dataset health dashboard

What Else You Should Know

At BallotReady, we’re strong believers in flexibility in exchange for responsibility. We hire exceptional people who are excited about our mission, and give them the freedom and leadership to act in support of constituents first. Our work is driven by our core values, which we encourage interested applicants to explore.

BallotReady is an equal opportunity employer and we value having staff who reflect the diversity of all constituents and voters. We especially encourage people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, transgender and gender non-conforming people, and people with disabilities to apply for this role. We know that the more we live out our commitment to building a diverse and inclusive team, the better our work will be.

Starting Annual Salary: [$104,800 - $130,000]*

*please note that BallotReady does not negotiate salary as part of our commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion

Benefits: monthly remote work stipend (for use towards home internet costs, co-working space access, home office furniture, etc.), healthcare, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401k platform, FSA, commuter benefits, unlimited PTO

Location: Anywhere in the U.S. (we are 100% remote)

Hours: We are completely remote, and, as a result, flexible on work hours. We do generally expect employees to be accessible during “BallotReady Standard Time”, which is 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. CT Monday through Friday.