Staff Engineer, Digital Democracy

CalMatters

Staff Engineer developing AI solutions for civic technology at CalMatters. Designing systems processing government data and providing technical leadership in a collaborative environment.

Posted 6/19/2026full-timeCalifornia • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $140,000 - $150,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudDistributed SystemsElasticSearchMySQLPythonWordPress

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design and evolve distributed systems that ingest and process government data from diverse sources
Design scalable data processing pipelines for transforming raw legislative data into structured, searchable information
Build and maintain robust APIs and infrastructure that power public-facing applications, partner integrations, and AI-powered experiences
Serve as a technical leader and mentor to Digital Democracy engineers
Improve system reliability, performance, and maintainability
Improve content discovery via search and conversational interfaces
Partner with external organizations to integrate their technology and data pipelines with ours

Requirements

What you’ll need

Significant experience operating in senior engineering roles, including experience operating at the Staff Engineer level or equivalent
Deep expertise in systems design, database design, and software architecture
Demonstrated success designing and evolving complex, data-intensive systems
Extensive experience with Elasticsearch, including: Data modeling and index design, Query optimization and relevance tuning, Scaling search infrastructure in production environments
Hands-on experience designing and operating cloud-based production systems including CDN configuration, application and data caching, load balancing, queue-based architectures, monitoring and alerting, and building highly available services that can scale under changing workloads
Experience designing and implementing APIs used by internal teams, external partners, and public consumers
Experience working in small teams where engineers wear multiple hats
Familiarity with AI-enabled applications, retrieval systems, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures
Expertise with our tech stack that includes: AWS, Cloudflare, MySQL, Python, Wordpress

Benefits

Comp & perks

medical, dental and vision insurance -- we cover 95% of the cost for employees and dependents
401(k) match program
life insurance at no cost

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

systems designdatabase designsoftware architecturedata modelingindex designquery optimizationElasticsearchcloud-based production systemsAPI designAI-enabled applications

Soft Skills

technical leadershipmentoringcollaborationproblem-solvingadaptability