Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About the role

Overview At Numero, we build software for political campaigns and nonprofits. Since our founding in 2019, we've scaled our platform to serve thousands of campaigns ranging from city council seats to US Senate races, and have helped them collectively raise over $10B in contributions. Our platform is an all-in-one system comprised of a donor CRM, broadcast email + texting tools, and payment processing pages that our clients rely on for their work every day. As our product is the platform that our users operate out of every day, this also means that when we build and launch new products, we do so to all of our users, at scale 🚀. We've experienced tremendous growth over the past several years and are hiring experienced engineers to help us scale and harden the data infrastructure that everything else at Numero runs on. In joining our team of 6, you will help shape our team's culture and have a substantial impact on the success of our company 📈 - come join us! Who we're looking for This is a staff-level role for someone who wants to own our data infrastructure end to end. Numero runs on databases that take millions of requests a day and hold billions of records - keeping them fast, reliable, and ready to scale is one of the most consequential problems at the company, and we're looking for the person to lead it. You'll own the direction for how we shard, query, observe, and automate our data systems, with the autonomy of a staff engineer to do it. Deep experience operating data infrastructure at scale. 10+ years, with a meaningful chunk spent as the person directly responsible for the performance and reliability of large production databases. Expert-level relational databases at scale. You've operated large, high-traffic SQL databases (e.g. Postgres, MySQL) and can and reason fluently about query plans, indexing, locking, replication, connection pooling, and the failure modes that only show up under significant load. Experience with partitioning, sharding, or other horizontal-scaling approaches is a strong plus. Breadth across data stores. You've operated systems like OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch) and document databases like MongoDB at scale, and you have strong instincts for which workload belongs where. A query-optimization obsession. You live in tools like pganalyze and Sentry, you can spot the query quietly degrading p99s, and you fix it before it becomes an incident - then put guardrails in place so it doesn't recur. An automation-first, DevOps mindset. You'd rather automate toil than do it twice - reaching for scripting and, increasingly, AI agents to handle migrations, monitoring, and operational work so our infra scales without scaling headcount. The judgment and influence of a staff engineer. You set technical direction, raise the bar for the whole team, and drive cross-cutting infrastructure work without needing to be told how. A pragmatic, incremental approach to change. You pursue ambitious long-term architectural goals but get there through steady, well-sequenced steps - not a rip-and-replace rewrite. You've led migrations and transitions to better architecture without disrupting how the team works day to day, and you're confident enough to understand a system on its own terms and improve it within the context it exists - rather than defaulting to "this is how I've always done it". Excellent written and verbal communication and high EQ. On a team this small, how you reason out loud and collaborate matters as much as what you ship. You are located in the continental USA (ET, CT, MT, PT) and are willing to travel 1-2x a year for company retreats and/or team offsites (usually held in California). Infrastructure is the foundation everything else at Numero is built on, so the impact of this role is enormous - the systems you design and the bottlenecks you remove are felt by every client, on every campaign, during the highest-traffic moments of an election cycle. What you'll work on This role sits at the center of a data platform that's growing fast - in raw volume, in the kinds of data we ingest, and in what we let clients do with it. Numero already serves millions of requests a day and filters billions of records in realtime, and the work below is about pushing that footprint further while keeping it fast. A sampling of what's on your plate: Improving our data ingestion + matching pipelines. We load external datasets - email, phone, and address validation among them - and run them against each client's data to enrich it for them, doing entity resolution across hundreds of millions of records. The work here is diagnosing, optimizing, and hardening those pipelines so matching stays fast and accurate as our data grows. Scaling our Postgres (on PlanetScale). Keeping our database fast and reliable as we grow into billions of records - starting with the highest-leverage, lowest-effort levers first: partitioning large, fast-growing tables, tuning indexes, and relieving hotspots before they bite. Looking furth

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