OpenGov is home to an exceptional team - passionate about our mission to power more effective and accountable government. By bringing the OpenGov Cloud to our nation's state and local government, we’re transforming communities so they can thrive!
Imagine yourself being able to help small business owners open their doors faster, ensuring our tax dollars are accounted for, creating safer infrastructure, modernizing the permitting process, and assisting with disaster recovery. The work you do here every day has a meaningful impact on people's lives!
🌟 OpenGov is a 2023 Top Workplaces USA award winner and a Forbes America's Best Startup Employer 🌟
Join our smart, fun, and humble team to experience the most rewarding career of your life!
Job Summary:
As a Staff Software Engineer - Data Science at OpenGov, you will play a key leadership role in shaping the data architecture that powers best-in-class SaaS solutions, enabling efficiency, transparency, and accountability in government operations. You will design, build, and optimize a robust, scalable, high-performance data infrastructure, leading efforts across data engineering, real-time streaming, change data capture (CDC), data modeling, transformation, governance, and applied machine learning.
In this role, you will work at the intersection of engineering, analytics, and business intelligence, owning the entire data lifecycle—from ingestion and processing to modeling and visualization. You’ll build real-time and batch-processing pipelines, optimize large-scale distributed systems, and drive the best data governance and security practices in an AWS-first cloud environment.
A typical day involves solving complex data challenges to ensure speed, scalability, and reliability. You will collaborate with a globally distributed cross-functional team of product managers, UX engineers, data visualization experts, and platform engineers to transform raw data into actionable insights.
We are looking for a passionate, strategic thinker who thrives on navigating the challenges of modern data architecture. You’re a self-starter, problem-solver, and technical leader who values clean, efficient, scalable solutions. At OpenGov, we embrace collaboration, innovation, and impact, and we’re excited to bring on someone who shares these values to help build the future of data-driven applications.
Responsibilities:
- Architect and develop robust, highly performant, scalable data processing pipelines for real-time and batch workloads.
- Lead end-to-end ownership of data infrastructure, including ingestion, transformation, storage, governance, and security in an AWS-first cloud environment.
- Define and implement the data strategy, partnering with engineering leadership to align on best practices for data engineering, data science, and analytics.
- Build and optimize real-time data streaming pipelines using Kafka and change data capture (CDC) to enable low-latency analytics and event-driven architectures.
- Model and transform data for scalable analytical workloads.
- Implement data quality frameworks, schema evolution strategies, and governance policies to ensure data integrity, lineage, and observability.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, UX teams, and data visualization engineers to deliver data-driven features.
- Develop reusable, maintainable, modular components that enhance OpenGov’s data infrastructure.
- Provide mentorship and technical leadership to data engineers, fostering a culture of excellence and best practices.
- Write and maintain detailed technical documentation, ensuring clarity in system designs, API contracts, and architecture decisions.
- Advocate for performance, security, and scalability best practices, proactively identifying technical weaknesses and crafting plans to address them.
- Contribute to OpenGov’s culture of innovation, adopting emerging data technologies and influencing engineering-wide improvements.
- Lead initiatives that solve the organization’s most complex data challenges, delivering tangible business impact.
- Drive continuous improvement in engineering efficiency, enabling faster experimentation, deployment, and monitoring of data solutions.
- Delight customers and stakeholders by delivering highly reliable, scalable, and insightful data solutions.
Requirements and Preferred Experience:
- BA/BS in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
- 12+ years of professional experience in software and data engineering, focusing on cloud-native architectures and large-scale data processing.
- 7+ years of experience designing and implementing scalable, highly-available, and high-performance data platforms, preferably in a multi-tenant SaaS environment.
- 5+ years of experience with AWS data and analytics services, including S3, Redshift, Glue, EMR, Kinesis, Lambda, and DynamoDB.
- 5+ years of experience building, optimizing and maintaining large-scale data pipelines using Spark, Airflow, or similar technologies.
- 5+ years of experience with SQL and NoSQL databases, including PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or similar platforms.
- 3+ years of experience with data streaming and event-driven architectures, including Kafka, Kinesis, and CDC (e.g., Debezium, AWS DMS).
- 3+ years of experience designing and maintaining modern data lakes and warehouses, with expertise in data partitioning, indexing, and performance tuning.
- (Preferred) Strong understanding of data governance, security, and compliance best practices, including IAM, encryption, lineage tracking, and access control policies.
- (Preferred) Expertise in designing, implementing, and maintaining scalable microservices and RESTful data processing and analytics APIs.
- (Preferred) Experience with real-time analytics and event-driven architectures, such as Apache Flink or AWS Kinesis Analytics.
- (Preferred) Hands-on experience implementing ML/AI pipelines using AWS SageMaker.
- (Preferred) Familiarity with BI and visualization tools like Metabase, Tableau, Looker, or Power BI.
» Leadership: CEO Zac Bookman (MPA from Harvard and JD from Yale) is truly a mission-driven CEO. He was named one of the 100 most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs, a Tech Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, and SF and Silicon Valley Business Times' 40 under 40 class of 2018!
» Growth: Record breaking growth with 1,800+ governments (and counting) using our products. Click here for read more.
» Culture: Winner of 2023 Top Workplaces USA award, Awarded Top 25 Cloud Companies to Work For, Winner of Forbes 2022 Best Startup Employers, 50 Best Workplaces award. Check out our Careers Video!
» Product: Named to the GovTech 100 (seven consecutive years), we are the leader in cloud software for our nation's cities, counties, and state agencies.
» Mission Driven: We are a technology company with a passion for the mission. We're powering more effective and accountable government.
Come join us and make a positive social impact!
OpenGov is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.
