Chief Technology Officer

Position Summary

Organizational Overview:

When TMC was founded in the wake of the 2016 election cycle, the progressive movement was at a crossroads. With Trump’s presidency and GOP control of Congress posing immediate threats to our communities, organizations saw a profound moral obligation to deepen and expand their work. TMC’s founding members came together to launch a truly cooperative organization to help do just that.

Together, we established The Movement Cooperative to break down financial and logistical barriers and act as an impact multiplier for the progressive movement. We help our members push the limits of organizing, electoral, and community engagement by radically shifting how data and technology is accessed and used. But our model is fundamentally a simple one: organizations pay dues to the cooperative and in exchange get access to an array of heavily-discounted resources and services, including voter files, software licenses for dozens of major progressive organizing tools, and strategic and technical support from TMC’s expert staff of analysts, engineers, data scientists, and researchers. We estimate that the value we have delivered to the movement now exceeds $250 million: we have grown to 75 member organizations and over 1,000 of their affiliate groups, learning and collaborating via shared technical infrastructure, trainings, convenings, and cooperative projects.

Position Overview:

The Chief Technology Officer is the vision-setter for how TMC provides technical support and strategic services to our member organizations.. They are tasked with holding the ever-evolving goal of providing world-class technology and elite data to groups that have an incredibly wide array of tactics, tools, target audiences, etc, and work on projects ranging  from electoral mobilization campaigns and voter registration to racial justice, reproductive rights, climate advocacy,  and mutual aid projects.

The diversity of our members’ needs is immense, and so the organization and technical systems that TMC maintains to meet those needs offer a singular creative opportunity for a talented technical leader in our political ecosystem.

Given the uniqueness of this Chief Technology Officer role, we strongly encourage you to review the criteria listed below and apply if most of them match your skills and interests.  We firmly believe that candidates with a wide variety of experiences can be successful in this position, and are excited to hear from applicants with backgrounds in data, technology, and/or engineering.  

The Chief Technology Officer holds responsibility for ensuring the stability and accuracy of TMC’s technical systems for use by its staff and members; these broadly include the data warehouse leveraged across the membership and the systems, tools, code, and approaches used to get data in and out of it. More specifically, the TMC tech stack currently encompasses:

• A BigQuery instance with a dedicated project for each TMC member.
  • Approximately 350 users leverage the warehouse.
• Civis Platform for orchestration, workflows, and templated scripts
• Over sixty centrally maintained syncs from tools used by TMC Members which include:
  • Database replication from vendor-owned SQL mirrors
  • Flat file transfers
  • AirByte for API-based syncs
• A dbt project to centrally manage the transformation of all synced data, in addition to communal data projects
• The Parsons open source Python package

The Chief Technology Officer manages three distinct Technology departments and oversees a staff of more than 20 people:

• Engineering: The Engineering Team is responsible for technical infrastructure, most notably the data warehouse and the syncs that bring data into the warehouse. The team currently includes a Director of Engineering, a Senior Data Engineer, a Data Engineer, and a Support Engineer. They own our sync infrastructure and dbt project, in addition to responding to member requests via Freshdesk.
• Data & Technology Strategy: The D&T Team is TMC’s largest team, currently at close to 20 staff, including a Director, managers, Project Leads, Strategists, and Data Associates. The team partners with our members, leveraging TMC’s resources to enhance and optimize their organizing work. Their work includes, but is not limited to, building pipelines to move data from the warehouse into organizing tools and building novel reporting systems,
• Special Projects: The Special Projects Team is tasked with cross-departmental work that leverages technology, such as low and no-code apps, to find solutions to hairy and novel problems. This team currently consists of a Director and Project Manager.

The Chief Technology Officer will have a strong work ethic and the ability to execute swiftly and efficiently, with proven project management skills. The measurement of success for the Chief Technology Officer is the overall health of TMC’s technical systems and teams. This position reports directly to the CEO.

Performance Expectations:

• Provides day-to-day leadership and management that mirrors the mission and core values of the organization.
• Vision-setter for how TMC provides technical support and strategic services to membership.
• Responsible for supporting the CEO to ideate and champion cutting-edge technical solutions, growing the cooperative through ever-improving technical service to members, and co-creating the strategic pathways to deeper organizational resiliency, particularly as they relate to TMC’s data and technology needs.
• Responsible for the stability of TMC’s tech stack, which ensures continuous member access to and consistent reliability of data synced and warehoused by TMC.
• Fosters a success-oriented, accountable environment within the organization.
• Represents the organization to our board and with our members, vendors, and business partners.
• Upholds and models TMC policies and working norms, while being an active and enthusiastic collaborator with all Executive team members working towards continuous organizational improvement.

Responsibilities:

Project Management

• Leads on multiple organization-wide and cross-departmental projects.
• Co-creates, defines, implements, and revises governance policies and procedures for the organization.
• Manages and disseminates team objectives and key results.
• Oversees and manages departmental budgeting.

Technical Leadership

• Charts vision, manage execution of, and oversee maintenance of critical TMC technologies, most notably its data warehouse and ELT systems
• Manages budgets for technology investments, and builds a team of staff and vendors;
• Developer of TMC’s long-term technical vision, including the potential development of new data models and the expansion of our innovative communal data solutions
  • Robust Data Models: TMC plans to create more vendor-agnostic data models to organize data points describing conversations, activists, donors; our long-term goal is more seamless movement of data between tools and organizations
  • Communal Data Solutions: TMC maintains voter contact and other data for many, many organizations, and (with members’ authorization) combines those datasets to enhance identity resolution across members and optimize voter engagement through shared contactability results; we hope to expand our work on this front to help members see more benefits from pooled datasets

• Sets and manages strategic objectives both departmental and organization-wide.

People Management

• Manages and supports the work of Engineering, Data & Technology Strategy, and Special Projects Teams
• Organizes and oversees the work and schedules of departmental managers
• Conducts performance evaluations that are timely, constructive, and equitable

Collaboration

• Works with the Executive team, department leaders, members, and the board on organization-wide policy and procedure development and implementation

Required skills and competencies:

• Domain Knowledge & Experience
  • Has familiarity with voter file data
  • Has a deep understanding of the progressive tech landscape, including both the organizations that provide technical support and services and the commonly used technical tool stacks
• Technical Skills
  • Able to communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience
  • Deep familiarity with Python and SQL
  • Experience working in and supporting complex environments made up of both custom-built applications and third party applications
  • Comfort with data storage, data warehouse, task automation offerings and managing containerized orchestration (e.g. S3, Redshift, BigQuery, EC2, Kubernetes) on at least one of AWS, Azure, or GCS
  • Familiarity with various approaches to and tools for ELT and data transformation
  • Familiarity with commonly-used tools and data structures in the progressive ecosystem including, but not limited to, NGP VAN, Mobilize, ActionNetwork, Hustle, etc.
  • Experience working with git and Github
  • Familiarity with security best practices for data warehouses and cloud buckets especially
• Management & Leadership Skills
  • Deep understanding of the progressive tech landscape including both the organizations that provide technical support and services and the commonly used technical tool stacks
  • Demonstrated flexibility and adaptability to lead and motivate teams, guide others without direct authority, and influence organizational leadership to collective success
  • Fluent in equity concepts and language, understands their own privilege and power, and is able to bring equity impact analysis to life in the context of their tasks. Dedication to supporting and advancing DEIA principles in growing organizations. Experience implementing and supporting DEIA initiatives within data and tech teams
  • Proactive, growth-oriented, pragmatic and detail-oriented project management skills
  • Creative collaborator within a remote team
  • Deep personal commitment to impeccable work and personal ethics
  • Cares deeply about getting results, stays attentive to all specific tasks/follow-up items, and consistently meets deadlines
  • Ability to thrive in a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment, with work often falling on evenings and weekends, especially during election months. Ability to prioritize member needs, especially during high-volume work periods when needs may all seem urgent and immediate
  • Highly organized with strong attention to detail and excellent follow-through
  • Outstanding data analysis, problem structuring, verbal/written communication, and presentation skills
  • Ability to think outside the box and collaborate on creative solutions

We especially support applications from people who have these additional attributes:

• Has managed the decision-making processes within a startup environment
• Ability to work creatively with the Research Director to expand our understanding of our unique multi-member dataset to enhance member utility. Understanding of and experience with A/B testing, RCT’s and more sophisticated statistical design, analysis and articulation in both electoral and advocacy settings is a definite plus.

Benefits:

The Movement Cooperative is dedicated to providing all employees a competitive salary, world-class healthcare, dental and vision benefits, retirement, unlimited paid vacation and sick days, flexible holidays, and all-staff holidays, remote virtual office, paid parental and adoption family leaves, and health and wellness benefits. The salary range for this position is $155,000 – $165,000. This is a full-time exempt position.

Next Steps:

Please submit your resume and a cover letter on TMC’s job board detailing why you are interested in this role and your qualifications in PDF format.

Here’s what you can expect from our interview process:

• Application Review
• Phone Screening ~15-25 minutes
• Materials Submission
• Panel interview ~60 minutes
• Reference Check
• Interview with CEO ~30 minutes

Please note we will not begin interviews until January 2024. We are looking to fill this position by February 2024.

The Movement Cooperative is an equal opportunity employer. 

The Movement Cooperative recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, citizenship status, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law.

At The Movement Cooperative, we have a clear vision: to be the organization where a diverse mix of talented people want to be, to stay and do their best work. We pride ourselves on bringing the best to our members, and we know our organization runs on the hard work and dedication of our passionate and creative employees.