Technical Lead

Power to Decide is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. At Power to Decide, we envision a world where everyone—no matter who they are or where they live—has control over their bodies and can decide if, when, and under what circumstances to get pregnant and have a child. Our mission is to advance sexual and reproductive well-being for all. We accomplish this by providing trusted information, expanding access to quality services, and catalyzing culture change.

We meet our mission largely through a robust suite of digital products. Our tools support millions of users annually, and we’re investing in smarter, more sustainable technology infrastructure to ensure we continue to deliver high-quality, accessible, and equitable digital experiences.

Power to Decide is seeking a full stack software engineer and technical lead to steward our digital products and infrastructure. You’ll be our internal technical expert, responsible for managing the codebase, guiding implementation strategies, and acting as a bridge between non-technical teams and external development vendors. 

This is a hands-on leadership role ideal for someone who loves solving complex problems, enjoys mentoring others (even if they aren’t technical), and thrives when they’re improving systems, increasing velocity, and reducing friction.

Join our team and help power systems that advance reproductive health and autonomy for millions of people across the country.

Key Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities under this role include:

Technical Strategic Leadership

• Partner with product, UX, and organizational leaders to scope technical feasibility, implementation options, and cost/timeline estimates.
• Architect system-level changes with an eye toward scalability, reusability, and future maintainability.
• Develop and evolve technical standards and workflows.
• Collaborate with product leads to determine feature priorities and release schedules.

Vendor Management (Including QA & CI/CD Processes) 

• Serve as the primary technical liaison for our external development vendors.
• Vet vendor proposals and code submissions for accuracy, quality, and efficiency.
• Coordinate and manage QA and CI/CD processes, ensuring bugs don’t reach production and releases go out smoothly.
• Manage environment orchestration across dev, QA, staging, and production.
• Monitor system health, logs (LogDNA/Mezmo), uptime, and error rates.

Product Engineering & Infrastructure Oversight

• Write, review, and refactor code (React, Ruby on Rails) as needed for core system improvements, bug fixes, and urgent updates.
• Deeply understand and document (at the right level) our system architecture, data structures, and deployment practices.
• Investigate and improve backend and frontend performance, security, and maintainability.

Cross-Team Technical Advisement & Innovation

• Translate complex technical concepts into plain language for staff across the organization.
• Support team members in articulating technical requests and understanding limitations or opportunities.
• Help shape technical literacy inside the organization.
• Stay current on tools, frameworks, and technologies that could reduce vendor dependency or unlock new features.
• Recommend and prototype new solutions when appropriate.

Qualifications

We are looking for someone who brings technical excellence, clear communication, and a deep commitment to equity and inclusion. The successful candidate will thrive in a mission-focused, agile environment and bring curiosity and integrity to everything they build.

The successful candidate will have:

• 5+ years of experience as a full-stack developer or technical lead.
• Strong communication skills with a collaborative, team-first mindset. 
• A background or strong interest in mission-driven work or nonprofit digital products.
• Proficiency in Ruby on Rails and React.
• Strong systems architecture skills, with the ability to quickly understand and improve legacy systems.
• Experience managing or evaluating the work of external vendors.
• Expertise in modern development practices, including version control, QA processes, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with containerization and deploying to multiple test environments.
• Experience optimizing the performance of complex web applications.
• Comfort with data security, including encryption at rest, expiring URLs, and privacy best practices.
• Experience working with and managing APIs (RESTful and third-party integrations).
• Familiarity with managing and forecasting costs for cloud infrastructure and APIs (e.g., AWS, Google APIs).

Preferred:

• Deep familiarity with React SPA architecture and performance trade-offs
• Advanced proficiency with infrastructure tools: Heroku, AWS (S3, CloudFront), and Cloudflare
• Experience setting up or managing GA4, Google Tag Manager, and/or Matomo
• Understanding of technical SEO/AEO, including structured data, page load performance, and crawling/indexing principles
• Experience with database performance tuning and memory-efficient queries
• Experience managing in-house APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, and stakeholder documentation
• Experience with:
• Rod Auth for authentication
• Twilio SMS integrations
• Google APIs, including Places, Maps, and custom routing logic
• Previous background as a Technical Lead, Product Lead, Release Engineer, Product Manager, or Project Manager.
• Expert skills working with WordPress/WPEngine and plugin configuration

Salary and Benefits

This is a full-time, exempt position Salary is $118,800 - $125,300, commensurate with experience. Power to Decide offers an excellent benefits package including health, dental, and vision insurance; 403(b) retirement plan; flexible spending accounts; flexible work schedules; and generous leave.

Power to Decide is committed to maintaining a diverse staff and an inclusive, multicultural environment. We are proud to provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants without regard to actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, parenting status (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions), age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, uniformed service member status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.