Technical Director

Summary

Join Community Tech Alliance (CTA) as an Engineering Director to lead the modernization of a crucial data system for a progressive political organization. This ground-floor opportunity involves rebuilding data infrastructure, leveraging modern technologies, and assembling a new team. You will be the technical leader, overseeing planning, execution, and delivery, while collaborating with leadership, product peers, and stakeholders. The role demands a dynamic leader who balances day-to-day management with strategic thinking and technical decision-making. CTA is a fully remote organization with synchronous working hours during Eastern Time, and the client is located in Washington, D.C. This is a career-defining opportunity to shape a high-impact project within a supportive, mission-driven organization.

Requirements

• Have led or been on a team that has been accountable for a large, complex project
• Be 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
• Have the ability to turn ambiguity into clarity and help a diverse group make sense of technical decisions
• Value continual learning, and prioritize work and assignments that help the larger group develop deeper understandings
• Be receptive to feedback and open to introspection when something goes wrong
• Have been on or worked with product engineering teams
• Have extensive experience working with data warehousing, ETL, and processing tools at scale
• Own technology decisions and understand the tradeoffs of using maintainable, off-the-shelf solutions versus when to build custom
• Have experience with GCP and BigQuery
• Prefer free open-source solutions and cloud-native solutions over paid commercial ones
• Have built and managed performant data orchestration pipelines and ETL applications
• Have experience managing infrastructure and deployments in cloud environments
• Have experience with continuous integration, delivery systems and pipelines
• Be authorized to work in the U.S. without restriction
• Be located in the US and able to work ET business hours
• Have experience with Python and SQL
• Have experience with Cassandra, Redis, Google BigQuery, and Hadoop
• Have experience with Dagster, Airflow, and dbt
• Have experience with GCP: GCS, GKE, Composer, Cloud Functions, IAM, Pub/Sub, DataProc
• Have experience with Terraform

Responsibilities

• Oversee the planning, execution, and delivery of all infrastructure and software
• Work closely with CTA leadership, product peers, and client stakeholders to synthesize diverse perspectives into a coherent technical strategy
• 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
• 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
• Create an environment that supports continuous learning, with psychological safety and acceptance of failure as a key feature
• Guide the team in embracing DevOps principles

Preferred Qualifications

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

Benefits

• Salary is between $170,000/yr and $190,000/yr, commensurate with experience
• Fully remote organization