About the PositionFiscalNote seeks an experienced Software Engineer to join our Data Engineering team. You will help scale and improve our data processing capabilities by designing, building, and supporting services that handle one of the largest collections of policy and policymaker data, across many countries, levels of government, and commercial sectors, including large unstructured content in the form of video, audio, and text. Your role involves creating reliable systems that can provide this data in a timely and accurate way at scale, ultimately making it accessible and actionable. You will design systems that integrate and work closely with partners in applications and data science to provide our customers with an unprecedented level of automated analysis and reporting.
About the Engineering TeamThe Data Engineering Team is responsible for the full lifecycle of open data in our Public Policy and Transcriptions products. We identify the datasets that we want to offer, then ingest, process, augment, store, and make them accessible to our clients and applications. We maintain the quality and usability of a rapidly growing collection of unstructured and structured data from frequently-brittle and obsolete external sources, mostly relating to policy and government action in the legislative and regulatory space. Our data powers multiple client-facing products and internal tools, and serves as the core foundation of FiscalNote’s success.
About YouYou take pride in ambitious projects that push your limits, and enjoy collaborating with team members to overcome technical challenges. You are committed to seeing projects through to completion and prioritizing the best decisions for the team. Along the way, you’re capable of communicating what you’re thinking to both technical and non-technical audiences, taking in others’ ideas as well as expressing your own. You’re comfortable around ambiguity and with a high degree of autonomy, and are excited about solving complex, open-ended problems.What To Expect In This PositionDesign, communicate, and develop solutions to complex problemsEvaluate technical choices and their tradeoffs objectively, ensuring the best path forward for the teamWrite robust, maintainable, and readable codeIdentify opportunities to improve our codebase or reduce the complexity of our architectureBuild data services for batch and real-time data processingEnhance monitoring tools for data pipelines’ health and data qualityCreate and enhance internal tools used for data review and augmentationWork with a full stack of technologies, including API services, databases, scheduled workers, queuing infrastructure, AI models, UI frontends, ELT pipelines, text search infrastructure, and more!What Sets You Apart3-5+ years of professional experience as an individual contributor in the software development industry, with a focus on backend or data engineeringStrong SQL skills and understanding of relational databases (especially PostgreSQL or MySQL)Significant experience designing and developing within a networked architecture, using APIs and/or message-based communicationProficiency with a version control system, especially gitProven ability to both work independently and as part of a collaborative teamHave experience with a successful working relationship with Product + UI/UX teamsExperience working with automated test and/or build systemsProficiency in Python preferredExperience running production services on Linux preferredFamiliarity with a Cloud computing platform (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc) preferredExperience with containerization tools (especially Docker, Kubernetes) is a plusExperience with document-based stores (NoSQL, JSONB, Elasticsearch) is a plusExperience with Airflow is a plusExperience writing and maintaining code in PHP is a plusFamiliarity with video and audio conversion tools like ffmpeg, yt-dlp is a plus