UX DESIGNER/ENGINEER

Somerville, MA/Portland, OR/Remote (US)

UX Designer/Engineer

At ActBlue Technical Services, we build and power the premier online fundraising platform for Democratic campaigns, progressive organizations, and nonprofits working to create a better future. We put power in the hands of small-dollar donors and make giving online as easy as possible. Since 2004, campaigns and organizations across the country have raised over $2 billion using our tools, with an average contribution size of $34 right now. Thousands of groups from presidential candidates to environmental organizations to local school board members count on our fundraising tools to fuel their organizing work.

If you’ve ever given online to a Democratic candidate or progressive organization, chances are you’ve used our software. With midterm elections on the horizon for 2018, we’re busier than ever helping small-dollar donors resist Trump’s administration.

We are seeking a UX Designer/Engineer to join our Donor Experience team. The main application you'll be working with uses a Redux+React front end. We offer autonomy, responsibility, and amazing colleagues talking about politics and tech all day, plus generous benefits. You could work remotely from anywhere in the U.S., our Somerville, MA HQ, or from our Portland, Oregon office.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING:

• Design and help build out new features in React that power the donor experience at ActBlue.
• Suggest enhancements to existing features and conduct A/B tests to validate your ideas and optimize conversion rates.
• Work with other UX engineers and the product team to create, maintain, and enforce a design system.
• Collaborate with other engineers to ship features and enhancements while learning (or teaching) something along the way.

WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING WITH:

• Our stack: React+Redux, Stylized Components, Node.js
• Our team of passionate, curious, innovative professionals

WHAT YOU'LL BRING:

• Strong interpersonal skills and comfort collaborating on a distributed (remote) team.
• Good eye for UI design and a preference for clean, user-friendly designs over superfluous ornamentation.
• Wide skill-set that allows you take a project from start to… nearly finished. You’re comfortable sketching wireframes, creating high-fidelity mocks, and then writing the CSS for it all. Bonus if you know JS, too.
• Deep knowledge of web standards for both maintaining compatibility and using state-of-the-art technologies.
• The ability to use your development knowledge to design features that are not only user-friendly, but also technically feasible. You collaborate with other engineers when you have questions about what is technically feasible.
• A drive to create pixel-perfect designs and the best-possible user experience, with an understanding of how to prioritize certain feature aspects when time gets tight.
• A team player mentality. You keep the end user in mind and enjoy hearing feedback from your teammates, yet know when and how to defend your own ideas in a respectful manner.
• Interest in progressive politics.

BONUS POINTS IF YOU HAVE:

• Competency working with React
• Expertise in conversion optimization in an e-commerce environment
• Experience designing complex web apps that are used by non-tech savvy people
• A deep knowledge of web accessibility best-practices

Candidates should provide a web or PDF portfolio, or at the very least be willing to show examples of your work during the interview process. Your portfolio should demonstrate a strong ability to problem solve and an eye for clean, user-friendly design. Be ready to discuss the life cycle of a project, from when you first started working on it to when it eventually shipped.

OUR ENGINEERING VALUES:

• We believe that ideas are more important than technologies.
• We understand that the tools we build have real-world consequences for millions of people and take that responsibility seriously.
• We know that code isn’t just a set of instructions for machines, but communication with other humans; style, elegance, and respect are important.
• We believe that an ability to balance paying off technical debt and rapidly completing a project contributes to the health of the codebase, engineering team, and organization.
• We believe that being correct isn’t enough; respect for your colleagues and users is fundamental.

"High Volume" means different things to different sites. To us it means ten thousand simultaneous active users, handling over $1M a day, processing four credit card transactions per second, and mailing checks/doing wire transfers to 2000+ groups a week. We use best in class tools (Rails, Node, PostgreSQL, React, Sidekiq/Redis, Chef) and methods (GitHub, extensive automated testing, continuous integration, deployment, cloud hosting) to deliver the best technology in politics.

We’re a small (but growing!) team that has a big impact on the future of our country. Each and every one of us is fully committed to our mission and we are looking for new team members who match our passion and are ready to dive in!

Follow us on:

GitHub: https://github.com/actblue

Twitter: @ActBlue & @ActBlueTech

We offer a competitive salary and a generous compensation package, which includes commuter benefits, fully paid health, dental, and vision insurance, an employer-sponsored 401k contribution plan, and a flexible time off policy. 

Women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and members of other minority or marginalized groups are strongly encouraged to apply. ActBlue is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against candidates on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, or veteran status.

ActBlue cannot at this time sponsor work visas.