Staff Software Engineer, Data Engineering

San Francisco Bay Area

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Full-Time

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On-site

About Us

At State Affairs, we’re on a mission to redefine how state government is covered—delivering trusted, nonpartisan news and insights that matter. We don’t just report what’s happening; we provide the critical context and technology that help decision-makers act. Think of us as the digital town hall for democracy. Our platform informs, empowers, and drives actions at the state level. And just like the democracy we cover, we value diverse perspectives, ensuring our work reflects the full spectrum of voices shaping state policy. This product-driven growth role requires a mix of marketing, data analysis, and product thinking.

Who We’re Looking For

What You’ll Own
  • Leverage big data to empower business decisions and deliver data-driven insights, metrics, and tools in order to drive customer engagement, business growth, and monetization efforts.
  • You will scale distributed applications, make architectural trade-offs applying synchronous and asynchronous design patterns, write code, and deliver with speediness and quality.
  • Work with a team of high-performing software professionals, and cross-functional teams to identify business opportunities and build scalable data solutions.
  • Build data expertise, act like an owner for the company and manage complex data systems for a product or a group of products.
  • Perform all of the necessary data transformations to serve products that empower data-driven decision making.
  • Build and manage data pipelines, design and architect databases.
  • Establish efficient design and programming patterns for engineers as well as for non-technical partners.
  • Design, implement, integrate and document performant systems or components for data flows or applications that power analysis at a massive scale.
  • Ensure best practices and standards in our data ecosystem are shared across teams.
  • Understand the analytical objectives to make logical recommendations and drive informed actions.
  • Engage with internal platform teams to prototype and validate tools developed in-house to derive insight from very large datasets or automate complex algorithms.
  • Be a self-starter, Initiate and drive projects to completion with minimal guidance.
  • Contribute to engineering innovations that fuel State Affairs’s vision and mission.

You’ll Love This Role If…
You’ll Hate This Role If…
What You’ve Probably Done
  • Bachelor’s Degree in a quantitative discipline: Computer science, Statistics, Operations Research, Informatics, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Economics, etc.
  • 8+ years of relevant industry or relevant academia experience working with large amounts of data
  • Experience with SQL/Relational databases
  • Background in at least one programming languages (e.g., R, Python, Java, Scala, PHP)
  • Experience working with large amounts of batch and real-time data.
  • Experience in building large data ingestion pipelines across heterogeneous sources.
  • Experience in developing data pipelines using Spark and Hive.
  • Working knowledge of leveraging cloud based infrastructure – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or similar for data and ML based application development
  • Experience with data modeling, ETL (Extraction, Transformation & Load) concepts, and patterns for efficient data governance.Experience with manipulating massive-scale structured and unstructured data.
  • Experience with distributed data systems such as Hadoop and related technologies (Spark, Presto, Pig, Hive, etc.).
  • Experience with either data workflows/modeling, front-end engineering, or back-end engineering.
  • Deep understanding of technical and functional designs for relational and MPP Databases
  • Experience in data visualization and dashboard design including tools such as Tableau, R visualization packages, D3, and other Javascript libraries, etc.
  • Knowledge of Unix and Unix-like systems, git and review board.
  • Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and a strong interest in developing AI-driven features and models.
  • Strong communication, collaboration, and leadership skills.
  • Ability to drive technical initiatives and influence decision-making at all levels of the organization.
  • Join us at State Affairs and lead the charge in delivering innovative solutions that drive our business forward.
Why You Should Consider Joining Us
Equal Opportunity Employer

At State Affairs, we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team that reflects the communities we serve. We welcome and encourage applicants from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives—regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status. We believe that different voices drive better decisions and innovation, and we are dedicated to fostering an environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to contribute.

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