VP/Head of Engineering 2025

About us
CTA is a not-for-profit group of progressive technologists and strategists that provide innovative data and technology tools to the progressive movement. CTA seeks to uplevel program impact by unlocking the potential of data, using software and data engineering, and removing barriers to entry. We are a growing team of engineers, data practitioners, product managers, and strategists looking to craft technolgy for progressive change.

Job Description

In this role, you’ll lead our engineering team and technical vision. You’ll partner closely with leaders in our executive, product, and partnerships teams as well as our strategic consulting and engineering team. You’ll foster a creative environment, adding order to a fast-moving team. You’ll provide coaching and mentoring to our diverse team of engineers. Our infrastructure leverages powerful open-source and cloud-based tools, including Google BigQuery, Cloud Composer, Airbyte (ELT/ETL), and dbt. We also build applications in Django, React, and NodeJS to help make data engineering workloads more accessible to users. This tooling enables us to empower our social-good organization partners to run effective campaigns and bring clarity to pressing analytics and targeting problems in the movement space.

Community Tech Alliance believes strongly that:

• Inclusive teams are strongest, and supportive work environments take investment, intentionality, and openness

• Empathy is the cornerstone of building smart technology solutions

• All team members should take ownership of the project and the team’s development

• Iteration is key, and smart solutions require action, not perfection

• Nothing great has been built without making mistakes and learning from them

As our VP/Head of Engineering, you should:

• Have experience architecting solutions leveraging cloud-based infrastructure projects with multiple contributors and stakeholders

• Have several years of day-to-day engineering management experience, leading both technical and people responsibilities. You should have experience or interest in managing engineering managers

• Be ready to dive into solving problems, writing code alongside the team, while also helping to guide our larger technical vision

• Have experience working day-to-day using a popular data warehouse, preferably BigQuery, but also warehouses like Redshift, Vertica, or Snowflake

• Bring a security- and reliability-first mindset to how we build and support products, and our CTA workplace

• Have led teams through intense delivery periods while still empowering engineers to bring their best work to our organization

• Be comfortable as the primary external face of CTA’s engineering team and vision (you can read more about our team and CTA’s awesome work on our blog)

Your responsibilities:

• Shape and drive our technical vision to meet CTA’s and our partners’ objectives and strategic goals.

• Lead and manage a small but high-leverage engineering team, including direct reports and an engineering manager with their own reports. Foster an accountable and values-aligned culture.

• Own our technical architecture and infrastructure with a focus on reliability, maintainability, and sustainability as the organization scales its contract and client service model.

• Remain hands-on with key technologies including GCP, BigQuery, Airflow, dbt, Docker, Django, and React to support critical initiatives and fill gaps while the team grows.

• Collaborate with the VP of Product, COO, and CEO to align engineering priorities with organizational goals, client deliverables, and strategic direction, and help lead on implementation of these on objectives internally and externally.

• Oversee vendor relationships and technical procurement, particularly for cloud infrastructure, data tooling, and client implementations.

• Support and evolve a shared data platform that powers data ingestion, transformation, and access for Partners, with reliability and privacy in mind.

• Oversee and assist with escalations or outages as needed, which may require availability outside of standard working hours.

• Serve as point for the technical team in client conversations, helping translate partner needs into scoped, feasible work as the organization shifts toward an agency model.

• Represent CTA as a technical thought leader

We use things like:

• Google Cloud Platform (too many individual services and APIs to name!)

• Python, SQL, and Docker run in containers environments on Google Kubernetes Engine

• Django backends, ReactJS frontends, hosted on Serverless Cloud Run on Google Cloud Platform

• HashiCorp Terraform and open-source build and testing tooling

• Windmill and other cloud-hosted tools that allow us to run an efficient remote team and solve problems quickly and without a lot of overhead.

Location

Remote position; anywhere in the US.

Physical Demands

The physical demands here represent those that an employee must meet to perform the essential functions of this job successfully. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions:

• Ability to sit at a computer monitor for extended periods of time

Salary and Benefits

Salary and title commensurate with experience. Salary starting at $190,000 annually.

We are a remote-first organization, so we provide equipment reimbursement. We offer a competitive compensation salary and benefits package, including:

• Generous healthcare, vision & dental insurance for employees

• Matching 401(k) contributions

• Generous paid time off (PTO)

• Generous holiday schedule

• Paid family leave
  

Community Tech Alliance provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.