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Engineer II, Surveys
Location: Chicago, IL
Office: 3 days/week in South Loop office
Reports to: Director of Engineering, Measurement & Insights
About Tavern Research
Tavern Research is a political tech startup building tools and insights to help our customers win elections and make better, evidence-based decisions. We specialize in scaling expert human work, such as content generation and survey research to support thoughtful, data-driven civic engagement. We're a venture-backed, mission-driven, fast-moving, and mostly technical team focused on supporting campaigns and organizations working to strengthen democratic participation. We are experimental by design and expect every team member to continuously improve how they work using new tools and technology. Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!
About You
You're a mid-career engineer yearning to build things that matter and to use your engineering skills to have an immediate impact on the world. You're past the "learning the ropes" stage and ready to own projects from concept to deployment, while still eager to keep leveling up. You've built enough to have opinions about tooling, trade-offs, and tech debt, and you know that sometimes the right answer is to hack something together and ship it by tomorrow.
You're curious, adaptable, and maybe a little obsessive (in a good way). You can zoom out to think about the whole system, but you'll happily spend an afternoon tracking down the one weird bug that's making everything feel haunted. You don't need every requirement spelled out; give you a problem and you'll make something that works, then make it better.
You like solving problems no one else has quite figured out yet, especially when they're messy, high-stakes, and politically relevant. You're comfortable wearing a few hats: builder, debugger, tester, occasional mad scientist. You take pride in delivering things that actually get used.
Our engineers use AI coding agents almost exclusively - we're constantly testing new models and new workflows, and coding by hand is a distant memory around here. If that sounds limiting, this probably isn't the role for you; if it sounds exciting, you'll fit right in.
Political experience is a plus, not a requirement. If our mission resonates with you, we encourage you to apply, even if you don't check every box.
About the Role
As an Engineer II at Tavern, you'll build tools that give our partners an edge in the noisy, chaotic world of politics, media, and influence. Some days, you'll extend production systems to support new workflows; other days, you'll prototype ideas that could become our next core product.
You'll work on problems of moderate to wide scope, sometimes straightforward, sometimes full of unknowns, and you'll be trusted to navigate both. That might mean stitching together APIs to move faster, integrating LLMs into new tools, or diagnosing why a data pipeline that ran perfectly yesterday is suddenly producing nonsense.
This role begins as a high-impact individual contributor position, but we value engineers who can mentor teammates, coordinate small project efforts, and grow into team leadership over time. If you're excited by pairing technical depth with increasing ownership and leadership responsibility, this role offers a clear path in that direction.
You won't just write code, you'll help shape technical decisions. You'll collaborate closely with product and engineering leadership to influence how we build, not just what we build. While remaining hands-on day to day, you'll be expected to anticipate bottlenecks, design with scale in mind, and ensure technical debt doesn't outpace our velocity.
If building fast, shipping often, and learning from the weird and unexpected sounds exciting, we'd love to hear from you.
We value in-person collaboration and expect employees to work regularly from our Chicago office. We're hiring for multiple roles and reviewing applications on a rolling basis-if the posting is still up, the position is still open.
About the Team: Surveys
You'd be joining the team that builds Surveyor, Tavern's end-to-end platform for designing, fielding, weighting, and reporting on survey research - plus the automated data-and-modeling framework the rest of the company uses to analyze results.
Lately we're focused on making research faster and more self-serve (AI-assisted survey generation, a cleaner survey editor, an external beta so clients can run surveys themselves), building an automated data & modeling pipeline (moving weighting, toplines, and crosstabs into a reproducible dbt/BigQuery pipeline), and hardening the platform to scale (billing, fielding automation, fraud prevention, reliability, and observability). As Tavern's largest and most mature product, Surveys is often the testbed for new capabilities before the rest of the company adopts them.
Responsibilities

• Build and extend product features, balancing reliability with experimentation.
• Own and evolve core product features and systems, contributing to architectural decisions and carrying work through to production.
• Support the growth of teammates through code reviews, technical guidance, and setting a strong example for code quality and testing.
• Work across a moderate-to-wide scope of problems, handling both straightforward tasks and areas with significant unknowns.
• Contribute to testing, code review, and stability practices, helping improve team standards.
• Prototype and experiment with new ideas and technologies (e.g., APIs, LLMs, AI coding tools, data pipelines).
• Collaborate with product and engineering peers, and occasionally clients, to ensure solutions solve the right problems.
• Identify and propose improvements to tools, workflows, and systems.
• Weigh trade-offs between speed, scale, and reliability, and help drive technical decisions that align with product and business goals.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional engineering experience, with a track record of owning projects end to end and supporting systems in production with increasing independence.
• Hands-on experience supporting production systems, with a track record of debugging issues and strengthening monitoring and alerting over time.
• Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, and Docker
• Experience working with databases, APIs, and infrastructure
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and system design
• Experience with (or strong interest in) data pipelines and modeling tools such as SQL, dbt, or BigQuery, and an interest in survey methodology
• Familiarity with version control systems and collaborative development workflows
• Ability to manage multiple priorities with minimal supervision
• Strong problem-solving skills, with good judgment in ambiguous situations

To be explicit: you don't need a degree to work here. You just need to be good at the things we're asking from you.
Benefits

• Premium health insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Office closed for all federal holidays
• 401k match
• Equity

Tavern Research is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
The pay range for this role is:
146,500 - 172,000 USD per year (Chicago, IL)