Product Manager

CTA is seeking a product leader to aid in the modernization of one of the most critical data systems in progressive politics. CTA is undertaking work with a key progressive organization to completely rebuild and manage key infrastructure. You will play a central role in rebuilding a piece of data infrastructure central to the progressive ecosystem. This career-defining opportunity offers the chance to shape a high-impact project from the ground up, leveraging modern data technologies and engineering practices, all while assembling and leading a new, cross-functional team. You’ll work within the supportive framework of an established, mission-driven organization with a history of delivering transformative solutions.

Reporting to CTA’s Project Director, the Product Manager will serve as the point person and point of contact on the initiative to all external stakeholders as well as internal CTA leadership and other CTA staff. They will work closely with the initiative’s engineering and product leadership to ensure timelines are met, communication is clear, and each stakeholder is consistently involved in the feedback loop. They will ensure regular status reporting as well as that the right reviews, approvals, and other checkpoints occur throughout the engagement. This role requires a self-motivated, detail-oriented, and assertive leader who can operate within a highly technical environment involving a wide range of stakeholders, employing high-level strategic thinking and exceptional communication.

About us

Community Tech Alliance is a group of progressive technologists and strategists formed to provide data infrastructure building blocks to the progressive ecosystem at a low cost. CTA seeks to uplevel program impact by unlocking the potential of data, using software and data engineering, and removing the barriers to entry. We are a small team of engineers, data practitioners, product managers, and strategists looking to create infrastructure for progressive change.

Community Tech Alliance believes strongly that:

• Inclusive teams are strongest, and supportive work environments take investment, intentionality, and openness

• Empathy is the cornerstone of building smart technology solutions

• All team members should take ownership of the project and team’s development

• Iteration is key, and smart solutions require action not perfection

• Nothing great has been built without making mistakes and learning from them

Other points relevant to this role:

• We are a fully remote organization, but have synchronous working hours

• Our client for this initiative is in Washington, D.C. You must be available for synchronous work during Eastern Time business hours.

About you

• You have a passion for product management and building efficient, useful products and processes.

• You have deep empathy for the end user and are able to differentiate between business and product requirements.

• You have led the discovery and requirements gathering process for a large, complex project.

• You value organization and prioritization. 

• You are able to take in multiple perspectives from your team, users and stakeholders.

• You are able to synthesize tradeoffs and facilitate meetings across multiple groups to reach consensus.

• You believe in keeping receipts and ensuring every decision is documented and documents are continually updated.

• You’ve been in situations where a key responsibility was turning ambiguity into clarity, and you can help a diverse group to align and make decisions.

• You are receptive to feedback and open to introspection when something goes wrong. 

• You have worked with product engineering teams to gather effort estimates and scope product development. 

Product Management and Technical background

• You have extensive experience working with data users and a deep understanding of data systems and processes - ex. warehousing, ETL, and processing tools at scale

• You’ve helped drive decision making and understand how to present trade-offs in clear terms.

• This project will be using GCP and BigQuery: experience with these tools is highly preferred.

• You have experience creating data models and data process flows.

• You have experience managing data products in cloud environments.

• You have experience with communicating, diagraming and/or documenting highly technical concepts in ways that can be understood by non-technical users and stakeholders.

Our Technologies and Languages:

• Python, SQL

• Cassandra, Redis, Google BigQuery, Hadoop

• Dagster, Airflow, dbt

• GCP: GCS, GKE, Composer, Cloud Functions, IAM, Pub/Sub, DataProc

• Terraform

We don’t expect every applicant to have had the experiences described or have worked with every technology we’ve listed, so we urge you to apply if you’re interested and some of the above apply to you! We’re looking for the right humans and hiring for the people over the position above all else.

Additional Requirements:

• Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without restriction.

• Must be located in the US and able to work ET business hours.

Physical Demands

The physical demands here represent those that an employee must meet to perform the essential functions of this job successfully. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions:

• Ability to sit at a computer monitor for extended periods of time

• Occasional travel to Washington DC

Salary and Benefits

Salary is between $130/yr and $150/yr, commensurate with experience.

Community Tech Alliance provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.