Helm believes that a more equitable world will be built by people with organizing superpowers. Our customers believe that people organizing in their communities are the ultimate agents of durable change. Join us and use your professional technical skills on our civic-political CRM to enable our customers to make material change in our nation in 2022 and beyond. Transcend even your best work with Helm’s high performance culture of freedom and responsibility.

Issue advocates and organizers are our inspiration. Building with and for them is our mission. We are a growing remote-first team that shares values with, learns alongside, and stands with the people who are doing the work to change the nation. So if you're highly motivated, super passionate about democracy, and want to join a team that is looking to build great things together, Helm may be for you.

As a Data / Backend Engineer in our agile cross functional Pod you will be empowered to solve problems, maintain, and improve systems that power our heritage CRM platform used everyday by hundreds of our customers. This will include individual and collaborative work with other engineers to plan, organize and deliver expert level Backend (PHP and Python) and Data (MySQL and MongoDB) solutions on AWS infrastructure. A successful candidate will bring strong analytical ability, contemporary cloud-native experience, and the ability to deliver results within a fast-moving, agile environment.

What you’ll be doing

• Working closely with a product owner and an experienced, highly motivated team of full stack engineers, data engineers, and devops engineers. Communicating progress, blockers, and issues with your team on a regular basis.
• Building and supporting contemporary cloud-native application architectures using 12-factor app concepts and microservices, and the cloud technologies used therein
• Creating and modifying complex SQL queries, managing and administering relational databases (RDBMS).
• NoSQL JSON-based document database querying, management, and administration.
• SDLC: building (build dependency and packaging tools), testing (unit, functional, and integration testing), and releasing software using Git version control, peer code reviews, and automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Addressing client support requests and production issues as prioritized by the product owner and the Client Success team.

Skills you should have

• Software development with high level scripting/interpretive languages and their frameworks, ORMs, and build tools to develop cloud-native systems. Ideally PHP Laravel and Python.
• Data engineering with relational and docstore databases. Ideally MySQL and MongoDB.
• Knowledge of software engineering fundamentals, object oriented design patterns (E.g. composition vs. inheritance, Pub/Sub, Dependency Injection), and Domain Driven Design.
• Ability to work in a CLI environment and familiarity with shell commands and tools.

Skills you could have

• Experience with Kafka and Stream Processing architecture (experience with Kafka Streams specifically desired)
• Experience with other Data Engineering tools such as Pandas, Spark, etc. and AWS services such as DMS, Athena, Glue, EMR, etc.
• An innate willingness to pick up, learn, and work with other technologies and environmental tooling like AWS, Datadog, Rollbar, Papertrail, etc.
• Experience with startups (<100 persons) and their need for active engagement, situational awareness, willingness to adapt and wear multiple hats.
• Experience with any of these technologies: ElasticSearch, Kafka, Redis, Jenkins, Scala, Javascript, Typescript, Node.js, AngularJS, Lumen, Ansible, Cloudformation, EC2, ECS, CloudWatch, SQS.
• Experience with Scala and functional programming

We know that the best candidates don't often check every box. Even if you don't meet every requirement above, please don’t hesitate to apply if you are up for the challenge of growing professionally and developing your skill set. We’d love to hear from you!

At Helm, the values of inclusion, diversity, and equality are paramount and a vital part of the core fabric Helm was built upon. All employment decisions are based upon our business needs, essential functions and requirements of the role, individual qualifications, and merit. We provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, religion, color, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, disability or veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws. With that being said, we wouldn't be able to accommodate candidates in need of work sponsorship at this time since we are a small company. If you find this role interesting and you hit on the elements above, please apply!