**Change Research **conducts research to understand public opinion. We aim to democratize access to public opinion research, in order to create a world where leaders have near-constant contact with the pulse of public opinion and can make more informed decisions. As a Public Benefit Corporation with two brands – Change Research and Embold Research – we seek to make the world more humane, scientific, and just; as a technology company, we seek to innovate and re-define what it means to measure public opinion.
This is a full-time, remote position reporting to the Technical Lead. We’re seeking an experienced senior product engineer who will play a key role in developing our go-to-market offerings for providing public-opinion research data at scale, and iterate on our products in collaboration with our product, sales, and polling teams.
You’ll be responsible for architecting and scaling the robust back-end infrastructure that powers our AI-driven client-facing data portal and internal pollster tools. This includes optimizing RAG-based retrieval pipelines and LLM orchestration, building high-performance data processing services for complex polling datasets, and designing the secure, scalable APIs that allow both clients and pollsters to extract actionable insights with minimal latency. Your work will support the company’s mission to deliver accessible, impactful public opinion research, helping clients turn data into decisions at speed and scale.
We are a team of engineers who are comfortable wearing multiple hats when necessary, so front-end engineering experience is a plus.
**Build:**Design and implement the core service architecture for our AI-powered data portal, focusing on high-performance retrieval systems and robust data pipelines that ensure reliable discovery and analysis.
Become the subject matter expert on backend architecture and system design for our growing product engineering team, setting standards for API design, security, and scalability.
Take a fuzzy problem from “we think we need something here” to a shipped solution: defining the problem, proposing the approach, and driving it to done without waiting for someone to hand you a spec.
Establish monitoring and instrumentation to track how your products are used. Iterate the product based on quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback to drive continuous improvements.
Develop and maintain the backend services for internal tools that our polling team uses to conduct surveys.
Refactor and migrate legacy backend services and APIs into a unified, scalable platform.
Innovate:
Try new things and not be afraid to fail; be able to re-adjust quickly based on new findings without burning too many resources.
Implement new event driven architectures to make our services more robust and reactive while lowering cost.
Ship AI-powered features and data pipelines in days, not months. You have a bias for action and the technical judgment to know when to deploy a ‘good enough’ solution to gather real-world signal before over-engineering the final system.
Spot opportunities others miss. Working at the intersection of polling data and AI, you’ll see product possibilities before anyone else does.
Communicate:
Be the evangelist for your features and spread adoption among users
Participate in scoping product solutions, push back when the problem isn’t well-defined, and propose ideas that go beyond the stated spec
Treat your teammates and co-workers with kindness and respect
Document and train the cross-functional team on how to best use the software you’ve built to get more done
5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, building back-end web applications. Less experience may be considered in certain circumstances.
Deep understanding of system design with experience leading backend projects from concept to production—from initial data modeling and schema design to final API deployment.
Comfortable making architectural decisions independently; have a track record of shipping performant, resilient services, and complex integrations without needing constant oversight.
Strong grasp of infrastructure-as-code and cloud orchestration, with experience building scalable environments that support high-concurrency workloads and data-heavy applications.
Comfortable using AI-powered tools such as Github Copilot, Claude Code, and/or OpenAI Codex to increase velocity in shipping new code. We are not replacing engineers with AI, we are using AI to empower engineers to ship better code faster.
Some experience or eagerness to learn our tech stack:
Python: FastAPI, Pandas
Postgres and BigQuery
Go
GCP: Cloud Run
Infrastructure Tools: Docker, Pulumi
AWS (Legacy)
Developer tooling includes:
Github Actions
Github Copilot, Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini
VS Code/Jetbrains/Cursor
Front-end stack includes:
React, Next.js on Vercel
Typescript, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn, Charka UI
Comfortable working directly with customers, data scientists, pollsters, and other cross-functional teammates; able to work with a variety of personalities
Enthusiastic, professional, and kind
Startup-minded: you plug holes, get things done, feel comfortable pushing to define products, and improve systems
When designing systems and writing code, you bias towards simplicity, usability, and readability over complexity
Energized by the opportunity to translate complex research data into actionable insights that drive decisions and policymaking