Freelance Python Django Developer Jobs in Mesa, AZ

Virtuous is on a mission to inspire global generosity by helping nonprofits build better relationships with their donors. We offer a modern software platform that provides mid-sized charities with elegant tools for fundraising, marketing, volunteerism, and online giving.

Our talented team is driven to disrupt the status quo in the nonprofit sector. We are hungry, humble, and committed to delivering best-in-class software solutions, customer success interactions, and sales experiences to the world’s leading nonprofits 

We also recognize the importance of giving back and making a difference in the communities where we live and work. That's why we practice radical generosity by volunteering at nonprofits or going the extra mile for our team and the customers we serve. We take our work seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We believe that life is too short not to love what you do. 

The ideal candidate for Virtuous embodies our values by:

• Asking questions with a spirit of curiosity

• Giving feedback freely with candor & grace, welcoming it in return

• Displaying a passion for philanthropy and technology 

• Serving with joy. Everyone is willing to make the coffee!

• Celebrating the wins & milestones of others 

• Assuming good intent & demonstrating trust in others 

• Pursuing relationships with people different from themselves & creates space to be human

Find our core values & more here.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack) to join our growing Engineering team. This role will report directly to Engineering leadership and collaborate cross-functionally with stakeholders across Product, Design and Engineering.

You'll help us build, scale, and maintain the web applications that power the Virtuous platform — keeping them fast, reliable, and observable as our traffic and data grow, while also shipping the net-new features that win deals and deepen the value customers get from the product. You should feel comfortable across the full stack, from crafting intuitive UIs to designing robust backend services, but gravitate toward the harder questions: How does this behave under load? Where does it fall over, and how do we know before our customers do? How do we ship quickly without sacrificing reliability?

It's essential that you already know and actively use modern AI development tools and that you're curious about how to make them work harder for you. We treat AI agents as a core part of how strong engineers work today: a force multiplier across the entire stack. But we never trade speed for quality. You stay firmly in the driver's seat, owning the correctness, design, and long-term health of everything you ship, and bringing the judgment to know when to lean on a tool, when to question it, and when a hard problem still demands your own thinking.

Our current tech stack is Python/Django on the backend, with PostgreSQL as our primary datastore. On the frontend, we're actively migrating from React/GraphQL toward a leaner, server-side architecture built on HTMX. We're continually evaluating tools and frameworks to support a growing platform, and a willingness to explore new technologies and offer thoughtful input into technical and infrastructure decisions is important to us.

You'll own meaningful, high-impact areas of the platform end to end — not just contribute to them. Specifically, you can expect to:

• Own the performance and scalability of our data layer as we onboard larger and more complex organizations — indexing, query optimization, read replicas, partitioning, and connection pooling — so onboarding and day-to-day usage stay fast and reliable even at enterprise scale

• Own our asynchronous and background-processing infrastructure (e.g., Celery), keeping it healthy, observable, and able to keep pace with growing data volume

• Design, build, and ship net-new, revenue-driving features across the full stack — from messaging and bulk-sending capabilities to richer reporting, analytics, and email experiences

• Help reinforce and extend our move to a server-side, HTMX-based frontend, improving both developer velocity and front-end reliability

• Design, build, and maintain scalable web applications used by nonprofit organizations around the world

• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to understand user needs and translate them into technical solutions

• Write clean, testable, and efficient code across the frontend and backend

• Contribute to architectural discussions and help drive technical decision-making across the platform

• Participate in code reviews, and help foster a culture of learning and improvement

• Own the reliability, performance, and observability of the systems you work on — instrument them well, set meaningful alerts, and treat production health as a first-class part of the work

• Provide thoughtful feedback on technology choices as we evaluate changes across our stack

• Support a culture of experimentation, iteration, and continuous delivery

• 6+ years building modern web applications, including meaningful time spent running and scaling them in production

• Proficiency in Python and frameworks like Django (or similar)

• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) as part of your regular development workflow

• Experience operating cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tooling (e.g., Terraform)

• Experience with JavaScript/TypeScript and frontend frameworks such as React or Vue

• Strong understanding of relational databases such as PostgreSQL — not just querying them, but tuning them: indexing, query optimization, and strategies for scaling (read replicas, partitioning, connection pooling, etc.)

• Experience integrating with RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs

• Solid DevOps fundamentals: CI/CD pipelines, containerization, infrastructure monitoring, and hands-on experience scaling applications under real load

• Comfort with observability tooling (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) and a habit of using it to debug and prevent production issues

• A love for building quality products that delight users and solve real problems

• Strong communication skills and a team-first mindset

• Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes) or modern PaaS deployment

• Experience defining and working against SLOs/SLIs, or otherwise formalizing reliability targets

• Experience working in a SaaS or B2B product company

• Familiarity with C# / .NET

• Prior experience in the nonprofit tech space

• Contributions to open-source projects or relevant technical blogs

• Excitement about helping teams grow and mature their engineering practices

What We Offer

• Market competitive pay leveraging Carta data

• Employee recognition through Bonusly (birthdays, anniversaries, achievements, etc.)

• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching- 50% match up to 6% of compensation after 90 days

• We value our employee’s work-life balance and encourage taking advantage of Unlimited PTO

• Supportive time off including paid volunteer days and company holidays

• Employer-contributed healthcare benefits, encompassing medical, dental, and vision coverage, with plans available for dependents and choices for Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA).

• 12 weeks primary parent leave, 4 weeks secondary parent leave - full pay (adoption as well)

• We pride ourselves on Community and host exciting company outings and events.

We’ve recently noticed an increase in recruitment scams where individuals are impersonating recruiters to obtain personal or financial information through fraudulent interviews and job offers.
Please note that all legitimate communication from Virtuous will only come from the @virtuous.org domain. If you receive a message from other domains, even if they look similar (e.g., virtuouscareers.org or virtuousjobs.com), they are not legitimate and we recommend disregarding it immediately.