Senior/Principal Software Engineer

Our nation's elections are being challenged like never before, and the elections industry has historically stifled innovation to improve voting technology. As the first newcomer in the industry in the last 30 years, Clear Ballot rises to the challenge with a simple goal: Let's create technology that empowers our customers to improve democracy.

Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, with the right to vote being one of our greatest freedoms. While most Americans across the country watch and read about elections, Clear Ballot lives them. Great elections require secure and reliable tabulation equipment, full transparency of the process in which ballots are created and cast, and the ability to audit the results. Our mission is to surpass those expectations in a way that will raise the bar for the entire election technology industry.

At Clear Ballot, we view collaboration as one of our main drivers for success and we encourage all of our employees to share their thoughts and ideas to help both turn our bold vision into a reality and to make Clear Ballot a great place to work.

Clear Ballot is an innovative and growing manufacturer of hardware and software for voting systems in the United States. Our customers include states and counties across the country. We are seeking an experienced Senior/Principal Software Engineer to join our team of developers to help us improve our precinct and central count voting systems.

This position is a flexible, hybrid combination of remote and in-person from our offices in either Boston, MA or Nashua, NH. Please note that we are not able to provide relocation assistance or visa sponsorship at this time.

Your Responsibilities:

• Design and develop features and enhancements for our election management and central count software.

• Develop and contribute clean, well-factored code that accomplishes the task in as simple a way as possible.

• Participate in key product development activities, including planning, estimation, prototyping, development, automated test development, code reviews, and third-party library evaluation and management.

• Investigate and fix product issues from customer and field escalations.

• Advocate for incremental and continued improvements to workflow automation, including internal automatic tests and builds.

• Provide periodic support for our customers by staffing our election night operations center or providing on-site election day product assistance.

• Work with others as an individual contributor on a cross-functional team of software developers, customer support and product managers.

• Participate in planning meetings, contribute to the design of solutions.

• Clearly communicate technical and deliverable details to team members, customer support and product managers.

• Participate in code reviews and adhere to modern coding and code review practices.

• Provide mentorship and technical guidance to junior members of the team:

• Encouraging best practices to implement well-factored/tested software.

• Developing internal tools (and tests!) to increase our velocity.

• Reviewing and guiding the software design and specification process, from the creation of good user stories to actionable tickets.

• Guiding implementation details relating to performance and reliability.

• Being a trusted collaborative partner.

Desired Skills & Experience:

• Master's or bachelor's degree in computer science or similar field of study.

• 7+ years of experience as a software engineer developing on-premise or SaaS products.

• Excellent interpersonal skills.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Strong commitment to good software engineering practices, including incremental development, code reviews, build and test automation, secure coding practices, hygienic third-party library management.

• Experience with Python, PyTest, PEP8, Black, OpenSSL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue, Bootstrap, bash, Git, Jira, Docker, MySQL, and Debian-based Linux.

• Experience with object-oriented software development and dynamic programming languages.

• Solid understanding of different types of automated tests, including unit tests, integration tests, correctness tests and performance tests.

• Experience using a modern issue tracking system such as Jira.

• Experience working on collaborative, agile software development teams.

• A knack for understanding and refactoring complex software systems.

• Embodies a sense of personal ownership and accountability, especially in the context of tight deadlines.

• A mindset focused on growth and a desire to learn, a tendency to embrace challenges and persistence in the face of setbacks.

• Ability to embrace constructive feedback and to find lessons and inspiration in the success of others.

Nice to Have's:

• Experience developing clean, accessible user interfaces conforming to modern web development best practices.

• Experience with the principles of RESTful APIs.

• Experience and strong knowledge of backend frameworks, such as flask or web.py.

• Experience and strong knowledge of SQL and SQL server optimization.

• Experience optimizing distributed web-based systems.

• Experience working with and conforming to government standards and certification processes.

• No prior experience in the election industry is required.

Clear Ballot Group, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to diversity and dedicated to professional development and advancement. We believe everyone deserves to work in a welcoming, respectful and considerate environment. We live by our values and hire accordingly.

Our talented team and driven investors share a passion for solving problems and restoring confidence in America's democratic process. We are looking for energetic professionals to join us in this mission.

Take a minute and ask yourself this question: Do you care about increasing transparency in elections, defending a fair democratic process, and innovating for public good?

If the answer is a resounding "YES!", we want you to join our team.