Location: Remote, New York City, or San Francisco

Role Type: Full-time

Compensation: $159k

Visa sponsorship: Not available

Hires remotely in: United States

Preferred timezones: Eastern, Central or Pacific TImezones

Remote work policy: Onsite or remote

Recidiviz is thrilled to be hiring a Senior Software Engineer- Backend to join our engineering team! We’re a small, fast-moving group that develops and maintains the products that drive Recidiviz’s impact among criminal justice agencies. We are focused on expanding our team’s work and deepening its impact everywhere we are deployed. That’s where you come in. We’re looking for someone who is excited to help us grow our existing technical platforms as well as build new products that will increase our impact across the country.

About us

Our mission is to accelerate progress toward a smaller, fairer, safer criminal justice system—and to do so at-scale. Recidiviz is a tech startup meets justice nonprofit: we take the speed and problem solving of the tech world and apply it to big public policy challenges where there is huge opportunity for impact. Using modern data infrastructure and thoughtful product design, we’ve been able to safely and permanently reduce incarceration and improve outcomes. We work side-by-side with justice-impacted communities, ecosystem partners, and leaders of the criminal justice system to build a better path forward. In addition to the revenue we earn, some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations—like Y-Combinator, MacKenzie Scott, and Arnold Ventures—support our work.

About the role

In this role, you will work with our product, design, and engineering teams to develop and maintain the web applications and data pipelines that help Recidiviz and our partner organizations foster a healthy and open criminal justice data ecosystem. You will collaborate with staff across the organization to ensure our products are as impactful and scalable as possible. You should have a solid grasp of engineering best practices, a willingness to dive into tough problems and diverse data, and a collaborative and kind nature to add to our culture.

What you’ll achieve

• Work with our product and design teams to build impact-oriented products that facilitate an open criminal justice data ecosystem
• Work with our engineering and data teams to implement testable and maintainable features across our full-stack web apps and backend data infrastructure
• Collaborate with external users of our products to ensure our work is scalably launchable and configurable across all states and systems
• Ensuring the long-term health of our engineering organization by maintaining high bars for security, privacy, operations, quality, documentation, testing, and ethics

Who you are

• High empathy and kindness
• 3+ years of practical experience building production, user-facing software in a collaborative environment
• Experience working in a cross-functional setting with multiple stakeholders
• Experience writing code in Python, or willingness to learn
• Experience working with SQL databases, or willingness to learn
• Experience working with map reduce frameworks like Apache Beam, or willingness to learn
• Experience working with orchestration platforms like Apache Airflow, or willingness to learn
• Experience working in cloud infrastructure environments like Google Cloud Platform, or willingness to learn
• Comfort working directly with deployed systems to ensure high uptime, secure configuration, and rapid development
• [Preferred] Experience mentoring and coaching junior engineers
• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field or equivalent experience

What we offer

• Kind, effective, extremely sharp colleagues, working together on a mission that matters
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents, including HMO, PPO, HSA, and FSA options
• Complimentary One Medical membership (depending on location)
• Life and disability insurance
• Flexible and generous time off, including holidays, PTO, sick and volunteer time
• Paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan (pre-tax or Roth), with company match and no vesting period
• Monthly ClassPass credit for personal fitness
• Complimentary mental health support via Talkspace
• Access to pre-tax transportation & commuter benefits
• Well-located offices in San Francisco and New York, with the flexibility to work remotely
• An annual company offsite with other ad-hoc gatherings
• All the exhilarating challenges and professional growth opportunities of a tech startup

More about Recidiviz

Recidiviz was an all-volunteer effort until early 2019, when Clementine, Andrew, and Josh founded the organization. Since then, we’ve built an A-team of software engineers, designers, product managers and domain experts, from companies like Google, Apple, Dropbox, Opower, and Sidewalk Labs. Recidiviz was part of Y-Combinator’s 2019 class and has received support from some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations, including Arnold Ventures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Schmidt Futures, Ford Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation.

Now, four years in, Recidiviz works with (and earns revenue from) 11 state partners – big and small, red and blue – and covers 25% of the US incarcerated population. We have helped to get tens of thousands of people out of the criminal justice system, safely and equitably, and saved states nearly $1 billion. In the next five years, Recidiviz plans to partner with 40 states and help 250,000 people who are stuck in the system to get out and stay out. In addition to partnering with state Departments of Corrections, Recidiviz collaborates with and learns from partners – from organizations like the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) to community based organizations and justice-impacted individuals, whose perspectives guide our work.

To learn more about how we do what we do, check out our 2022 Year in Review, read some press coverage, or watch our recent TED Talk. And if you’re really keen to see our work, you can dive into our Github :).

An important note

Lasting change is always built on diversity. Recidiviz recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, gender identity and all protected status as required by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a special need that requires accommodation, please let us know in your application. Even if you don't think you meet all the criteria above, drop your resume, and we'll take a look – you might be great for another role and/or another time!