Managing Director of Tech

Position description

Full-time • Competitive Pay • Excellent Benefits • Work from Anywhere in the Contiguous U.S.

Application deadline: May 15th 2025, applications reviewed on a rolling basis

Managing Director of Technology at MoveOn

Full-time • Competitive Pay • Excellent Benefits • Work From Anywhere in the Continental U.S.

MoveOn is a people-powered force for progress. We wield independent political power by bringing millions together to take action to create a country with a place of honor and dignity for everyone—where all are welcome, we take care of one another, and where everyone is set up to thrive.

For more than a generation, MoveOn has been a bulwark against the radical right and has channeled millions of voices to end wars, protect democracy, and advance justice for all. We've built political power for progressive change through mobilizing the left to Democrats so that we can advance our vision of an America for all.

MoveOn is the largest multi-issue digital first political campaigning organization in the country. We drive rapid-response campaigns at scale on a multitude of key issues at high-impact moments while building sustainable campaigns that resonate and grow over time. Whether its democracy, health care, foreign policy, economic justice, immigration or otherwise, MoveOn provides our members with timely ways to take action for change.

The Managing Director of Technology is responsible for leading a team of six technologists who perform tech related work in support of MoveOn’s organizational goals. Tech has been a part of MoveOn’s DNA since our founding in 1998. MoveOn pioneered some of the first online tactics for progressive collective action — from online petitions to distributed event organizing tools to one of the earliest video-sharing tools. Technology, data, and infrastructure have powered MoveOn’s election program tactics, rapid response mobilization tactics, and played an outsized role in MoveOn’s growth. MoveOn is an advisor to many political tech think tanks and companies, an advocate of political tech collective bargaining, and supports the political tech ecosystem through open source software development such as its flagship peer-to-peer text banking system Spoke.

The tech team is very talented with a well established culture so we are looking to bring on a Managing Director of Technology with strong management skills to continue to empower our staff. The candidate should be ready to roll up their sleeves and lead the team in building and supporting technologies to power the progressive work at MoveOn and beyond.

Some current tech team projects include: building a CRM web application that will allow organizers to manage contact lists and track outreach results, written in Typescript; constructing and maintaining numerous data pipelines between vendor tools and our custom global data schema using Python and dbt as the final steps of a large migration off our legacy tool set.

Responsibilities:

• Setting strategic plans for the tech team in partnership with the product team.
• Project management of large, cross domain technical projects, including coordination with external collaborators.
• Direct management of existing six team members including five software engineers, a data architect, plus possibly future IT staff or other specialized technical roles.
• Hiring, training, coaching, and providing regular feedback to team members.
• Creating and managing the team budget, contracts, and vendor relationships.
• Team lead responsibilities such as: process development, on-call and tech support coverage coordination, retreat planning, designing team structures and norms, identifying owners for software projects spanning across realms and initiatives, and maintaining a team culture where everyone can thrive.
• Coordinating with cross organizational teams to identify, design, and deploy tech-based tactics that support MoveOn’s objectives in partnership with the product team.
• Working together with the CTDO in setting security policy and literacy across the organization.
• Conducting hands-on engineering work through some combination of coding, 1-1 pairing, hackathons, mentorship, PR reviews, etc. Individual engineering contributions will be about 20% of this role and are important for staying connected to the work and the day-to-day experiences of team members.

To be a successful candidate, you will ...

• Be comfortable wearing multiple technical hats. Our team’s work encompasses multiple technical areas including cybersecurity, data engineering, and web application engineering. As a team lead, you will need to make decisions across all of these areas.
• Be passionate about leading technology in the progressive movement. Choices you make in MoveOn will also influence the choices organizations across the movement use technology.
• Be a good decision maker. You don’t have to make all of the decisions but you need to make sure that decisions are being made when necessary and that the decision making process and outcomes are clearly communicated to the people whose work is impacted.
• Take your management responsibilities seriously. The coaching, support, and decision making you do for the team is as important as any individual tech contributions.
• Be a good communicator. You will need to thread the needle between the needs of different team leads and will regularly be syncing up with the director of product to keep a clear vision of the tech roadmap and vision. Being able to effectively distill projects’ technical trade offs will be key in keeping roadmaps on track.

Requirements

• Significant experience as a software engineer, preferably in a political setting.
• Fluency in at least one programming language and web development platform, with significant prior development experience in at least two programming languages.
• Prior people management experience, preferably leading teams of software engineers.
• Experience debugging and resolving a major production problem.
• Experience scaling applications and troubleshooting performance bottlenecks at the database and application layers.
• Experience navigating high-level decisions about tech ecosystems and roadmaps.
• Determined and thorough - can see a project through from idea to prototyping, design, production, scaling and beyond. Experience carrying a 6 month or longer project over the finish line.
• Ability to be effective in an organization whose staff all work remotely.
• Experience developing strategic plans and making prioritization decisions for a team or department or project.
• Experience project managing technical projects with diverse stakeholders.
• Ability to communicate technical results with a nontechnical audience.
• Political or community organizing experience is a bonus but not required.

Reports to: Chief Technology and Data Officer

Location: Position may be based anywhere in the continental United States. May require occasional travel.

Classification, Salary and Benefits: At MoveOn, we commit to equity in our compensation philosophy and practices. We are committed to equal pay for equal work. To counter systemic compensation issues in this country and pay inequality, we have a nonnegotiable compensation practice. We utilize benchmarking and peer organization data to ensure we provide competitive nonprofit compensation and benefits. The annual salary for this position is $165,041.80. In addition to the base salary, we offer a monthly home office subsidy. We also offer an internet and phone subsidy of $2,100 annually and a health and wellness subsidy of $900 annually. All of these cash benefits are added to your bimonthly paycheck. We offer strong medical, dental, and vision benefits, which are free to employees and children of employees (spouses or domestic partners can be added at a subsidized rate). We offer employer-paid premiums for life insurance; four weeks accrued paid vacation time per year, prorated for the period that you work; 18 weeks of paid parental leave (birth, adoption, foster care placement of a child), 10 days accrued paid sick time prorated for the period that you work; paid family medical leave; and 8 staff holidays and 6 floating holidays. We contribute 5% to your 401(k) after six months of employment. We also offer a $1000 in professional development budget each year for each staff member.

Application instructions

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