Technical Director Save

CTA is seeking an engineering leader to spearhead the modernization of one of the most critical data systems in progressive politics. CTA is undertaking work with a key progressive organization to completely rebuild and manage key infrastructure. As an architect of this ground-floor initiative, you will play a central role in rebuilding a piece of data infrastructure central to the progressive ecosystem. This career-defining opportunity offers the chance to shape a high-impact project from the ground up, leveraging modern data technologies and engineering practices, all while assembling and leading a new, cross-functional team. You’ll work within the supportive framework of an established, mission-driven organization with a history of delivering transformative solutions.

Reporting to CTA’s VP of Engineering, the Director will be the technical leader for the initiative. They will oversee the planning, execution, and delivery of all infrastructure and software, working closely with CTA leadership, product peers, and client stakeholders to synthesize diverse perspectives into a coherent technical strategy. This role requires a dynamic leader who can seamlessly balance day-to-day management—such as task assignment, code reviews, and ensuring adherence to high execution standards—with high-level strategic thinking and technical decision-making.

About us

Community Tech Alliance is a group of progressive technologists and strategists formed to provide data infrastructure building blocks to the progressive ecosystem at a low cost. CTA seeks to uplevel program impact by unlocking the potential of data, using software and data engineering, and removing the barriers to entry. We are a small team of engineers, data practitioners, product managers, and strategists looking to create infrastructure for progressive change.

CTA believes strongly that:

• Inclusive teams are strongest, and supportive work environments take investment, intentionality, and openness

• Empathy is the cornerstone of building smart technology solutions

• All team members should take ownership of the project and team’s development

• Iteration is key, and smart solutions require action not perfection

• Nothing great has been built without making mistakes and learning from them

Other points relevant to this role:

• We are a fully remote organization, but have synchronous working hours

• Our client for this project is in Washington, D.C. You must be available for synchronous work during Eastern Time business hours.

About you

• You have led or been on a team that has been accountable for a large, complex project.

• You are able to take in multiple perspectives from your team and stakeholders, synthesize tradeoffs, and chart a course of action that moves the project forward—all while remaining diplomatic.

• Thinking through migrations and understanding data flows across multiple systems is second nature.

• You’ve been in situations where a key responsibility was turning ambiguity into clarity, and you can help a diverse group make sense of technical decisions.

• You value continual learning, and you prioritize work and assignments that help the larger group develop deeper understandings.

• You are receptive to feedback and open to introspection when something goes wrong. 

• You have been on or worked with product engineering teams

Technical background

• You have extensive experience working with data warehousing, ETL, and processing tools at scale

• You’ve owned technology decisions and understand the tradeoffs of using maintainable, off-the-shelf solutions versus when to build custom

• This project will be using GCP and BigQuery: experience with these tools is important

• When possible, you prefer free open-source solutions and cloud-native solutions over paid commercial ones.

• You have built and managed performant data orchestration pipelines and ETL applications

• You have experience managing infrastructure and deployments in cloud environments

• You have experience with continuous integration, delivery systems and pipelines

People Management

• The ideal candidate loves coaching and growing their team and will serve as people manager for the engineers on the team

• Play a critical role in building the cross functional team, participating in hiring efforts, and fostering a culture of equity, empathy, and inclusion. 

• Mentor and coach team members to promote open communication and innovation through trust

• Creating an environment that supports continuous learning, with psychological safety and acceptance of failure as a key feature

• Guide the team in embracing DevOps principles

Technology Experience

• Python, SQL

• Cassandra, Redis, Google BigQuery, Hadoop

• Dagster, Airflow, dbt

• GCP: GCS, GKE, Composer, Cloud Functions, IAM, Pub/Sub, DataProc

• Terraform

We don’t expect every applicant to have had the experiences described or have worked with every technology we’ve listed, so we urge you to apply if you’re interested and some of the above apply to you! We’re looking for the right humans and hiring for the people over the position above all else.

Additional Requirements:

• Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without restriction.

• Must be located in the US and able to work ET business hours.

Physical Demands

The physical demands here represent those that an employee must meet to perform the essential functions of this job successfully. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions:

• Ability to sit at a computer monitor for extended periods of time

• Occasional travel to Washington DC

Salary and Benefits

Salary is between $170/yr and $190/yr, commensurate with experience.

Community Tech Alliance provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.