Lead Software Engineer

Reporting to Engineering Director, the Lead Software Engineer will be responsible for building and maintaining critical infrastructure, leading continuous improvements to common infrastructure and libraries, and managing the development and technical implementation of new products. The Lead Software Engineer will also assist with mentoring, knowledge sharing, and training for the engineering team. We are looking for someone who is innovative, collaborative, and can lead a small, fully remote team of software engineers building data platforms and tools for researchers and data scientists.

Please submit a resume and cover letter, clearly describing your interest and experience to jobs@harmonylabs.org. Due to the number of emails we receive, we regret that we are unable to respond to each one.

What You Will Do

• Lead teams of 2-3 engineers including contractors to on time, meets-requirements delivery of engineering products including media research tools, data enrichment pipelines, and reporting applications
  • Coordinate activities of cross-functional teams
  • Provide technical guidance and support to build team capacity, ensure project success, and drive continuous improvement through best practices in development and architecture
• Architect scalable applications and foster innovation through collaboration
  • Gather requirements from stakeholders including data scientists, business strategists, communications professionals, and media-makers.
  • Design maintainable, extensible software products, ETL pipelines, and cloud infrastructure to meet stakeholder needs
  • Lead cross-functional teams to prototype and test new technologies, products, and solutions that advance organizational objectives.
• Write production code and actively contribute to the codebase of the products you design
• Manage technical infrastructure and champion documentation and knowledge sharing
  • Oversee comprehensive documentation for both technical experts and non-technical users to enable effective product adoption and team knowledge transfer
  • Oversee cloud infrastructure and technology service budgets to optimize performance and cost-effectiveness
• And other duties and responsibilities as needed and as assigned

Who You Are

• You are curious, independent, strategic, brave, and kind
• You thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment, expertly managing multiple projects at one time and delivering quality products and solutions within tight deadlines
• You have been working as a software engineer for at least 7 years, and have led small, multidisciplinary teams
• You are eager to work directly with researchers, data scientists, and mediamakers to help them discover and define their needs
• You are comfortable working as part of a fully remote engineering team
• You are able to manage your own time and work with other developers across multiple time zones
• You value collaboration and communication with technical and non-technical partners
• You have a proven track record of designing and building full-stack applications and have led the creation of several software products
• You are passionate about solving complex problems and care a great deal about completeness, correctness, and reliability in your systems
• You have a strong intuition for what makes software development effective—from architectural decisions and code quality to deployment strategies and user experience.
• You are adaptable and maintain focus on project goals, skillfully navigating challenges and adjusting plans when unexpected issues arise.

Desired Experience

• You have at least 7 years of professional experience in software engineering, computer science, or related technical fields.
• You have hands-on experience designing, developing, and maintaining complex software applications in a professional setting.
• You have strong programming skills and have built, tested, and optimized software using modern programming languages such as Python and Go
• You have hands-on experience working with a variety of data storage solutions, including PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and AWS Athena.
• You are familiar with cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.
• You have experience implementing automated testing CI/CD systems.
• You have knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies, including Docker, Amazon ECS/Fargate, and Kubernetes.
• You have experience building and managing serverless infrastructure with AWS services such as Lambda and Glue.

Details & Compensation

• This is a full-time, exempt position reporting to the Engineering Director
• This is a Level 4 position with a salary between $145 - 160K
• There is a generous benefits package, including:
  • Health, dental and vision insurance, employer paid across all categories,including for partners, children, and families
  • Unlimited paid time off, with minimum thresholds for use
  • 401(k) with 100% match of up to 6% of salary per pay period, with immediate vesting
  • Pre-tax spending plans for commute, parking, dependent care, healthcare
  • Professional development stipends, paid parental leave, sabbaticals
  • Harmony Labs is a 100% remote workplace, with home office set up and annual reimbursements, periodic in-person retreats, and access to conference space at WeWork
  • Harmony Labs provides a laptop

Broad perspectives and diverse experiences are key to serving society, and innovating in a way that responds to our complex, interdependent global context. While Harmony Labs employs only United States citizens and those non-U.S. citizens authorized to work in the United States, in compliance with national regulations, we strongly encourage people from backgrounds currently underrepresented in tech, research, media, and data science to apply. Harmony Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We value and welcome diversity in the workplace and strongly encourage all qualified persons to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

About Harmony Labs

We are a media research lab, using science, data, and creativity to research and reshape our relationship with media. For more than a decade, Harmony Labs has helped storytellers and strategists, decision makers and dreamers, harness the immense power of media to shape a positive, pluralistic future. With the Narrative Observatory, for the first time ever, we're harnessing powerful industry relationships to deliver one-of-a-kind data infrastructure that empowers partners to find, reach, and resonate with the right audience in today's media minefield. The Narrative Observatory delivers audience-based insights, narrative and network analysis, and empirical validation of cultural strategy and content---all derived from the actual behavior of real people and true audiences, not survey results, demographic groups, or inauthentic online activity.

We work with a wide range of partners on issues of existential importance, like climate, gun violence, political corruption, artificial intelligence, and more, using an approach to research that is rigorous, participatory, and public. One of the first papers we co-authored looked at fracking narratives in documentary film. The outputs we've created with our partners include websites, presentations, peer-reviewed publications, toolkits, curriculum, interactives, white papers, and media. And our work has been covered in the press, like in this recent New York Times article.

Founded by John S. Johnson in 2008, Harmony Labs is a 501(c)3 incorporated in New York State. Funders include Atlantic Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Google, and more.