Senior Software Engineer (Remote)
Company: Empower Project
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: May 20, 2025
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Job Description:
Want to use your engineering skills for good? Empower is hiring
software engineers!
Empower is a nonprofit that works to dramatically increase civic
engagement by helping groups organize their communities with
friend-to-friend outreach. That's called "relational
organizing."
In 2020, we were the largest relational organizing tech and
training coalition for progressive organizations and nonprofits,
training 77,000 people from over 1,000 organizations (especially
organizations that work in youth, Black, and Latinx communities),
growing to 5 times larger than even the Biden campaign's relational
program.
In 2022, we built on that work to do vaccine outreach as well as
some experiments on new styles of relational organizing. Those
experiments turned out well, and in 2024, we ran the largest
relational organizing campaign in history, mobilizing 47,000
trusted messengers to have 9 million conversations with 3 million
hard to reach voters. Obviously, things didn't go how we wanted in
the 2024 elections, but we have a bunch of ideas for how to
leverage our relational network and expertise to have an even
bigger impact in the 2026 midterms!
If you're a software engineer looking to make a difference, this is
an extremely high-leverage opportunity!
How does Empower increase civic engagement and voting?
We train volunteers to reach out to friends and family and share
personal stories about the issues that matter most to them.
When people ask their close friends and family to get involved or
vote, those friends and family members become much more likely to
actually do it. Empower is a product and course of training that
helps community groups scale up this kind of direct personal
outreach. (For a concrete example, see the FAQ.)
It's effective.Empower has been studied in nine different
independently-run, randomly controlled trials which all found that
its usage led to large and statistically significant increases in
voter turnout - far more effective than phone-banking,
text-banking, or door-to-door canvassing.
It's growing fast.The number of conversations Empower facilitated
grew by over 10x between the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, grew by
10x again in the 2020 election cycle, and then grew by 30x for the
2024 election cycle. In order to keep up that pace going forward,
we need to grow our team and keep adding features that help our
organizations!
What's the organization like?
There are two main teams: product/engineering, and
organizing/training. We're spread out all across the country, with
some clustering in the Bay Area and in Madison, WI (you could be
anywhere). The product/engineering team has one short stand-up
three times a week.
Empower is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate
based on age, ancestry, race, ethnicity, color, national origin,
gender identity or expression, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation,
marital status, family or medical care leave, religion, genetic
information, medical condition, physical or mental disability, or
veteran status.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are important to our organization!
Women, BIPOC people, and individuals from the LGBTQ+ community are
strongly encouraged to apply.
What's the stack?
Using TypeScript (we still have some leftover JS) everywhere has
allowed us to share important code across mobile, web, and
server.
What sorts of things do we work on?
Our roadmap is driven by the needs of our users. We talk to
organizations that use us, uncover patterns in their needs, and
then design our product to be maximally useful. We also take work
that keeps our product velocity as high as possible. Here are some
past examples:
We have a good foundation to build on and a lot of great feedback
from groups that used Empower in 2024, so there's a ton more
features to work on! A few things on the roadmap are:
Who would be a good fit?
This opportunity is perfect for someone who has honed their
engineering and product skills in other roles and now wants to put
them to use to protect democracy.
We're looking for a product-focused engineer who is a generalist
and who:
If your background or experience are a little different but you
think you'd be great in this role, please apply!
What's the compensation like?
Our payment philosophy is: we want to attract great software
engineers, so we pay more generously than most nonprofits (though
of course less than big tech companies). And we're using a fixed
scale because salary negotiations are a common source of
inequitable pay in software engineering.
Our starting pay scale for new engineers is based on years of
software engineering experience:
Folks with nontraditional backgrounds are great too! SWE-adjacent
work (and masters degrees) will still count as experience, but at a
lower rate.
After starting, there may also be merit-based raises as well as
cost of living adjustments.
And, while we're typically pretty good at keeping people moving up
as they get more experience, we're also a nonprofit, and
fundraising is harder in some years than others, so this isn't a
guarantee of an annual raise.
We also provide full health care, and each year, there are 10
vacation days, 10 paid holidays, 7 paid personal days, in addition
to sick leave.
What's great about working here?
FAQ:Concretely, how does Empower increase civic engagement and
voting?
Here's an example. In 2018, a group used Empower to help organize
Latinx restaurant workers who wanted a minimum wage, rather than $2
+ tips, in Michigan. Those workers talked about the issue with
their friends and family - who were often low-propensity voters -
and just before the election, asked them something like, "I need
this minimum wage. Will you vote on my behalf?"
As you might imagine, this kind of direct personal ask is immensely
powerful for increasing engagement and getting people to vote - and
our positive results are backed up by multiple, independent, large
random controlled studies of Empower. Empower has been shown to be
much more effective than e.g. a stranger calling or knocking on a
door. This project is one of the most cost-effective methods of
increasing turnout.
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Keywords: Empower Project, Sunnyvale , Senior Software Engineer (Remote), IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California
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