Software Engineer, DevOps

Job Overview

State Affairs is the nation's leading news and policy intelligence platform focused on state governments. We combine nonpartisan coverage of Statehouses across the country alongside state government data and AI-native tools into a singular platform. We inform and empower decision makers, policy professionals and citizens through our award-winning journalism and data – delivering profound insights to help our customers decode and act on state politics and policy. We're building a category-defining business that will reshape America as we strengthen visibility into what's happening and why at the state level.

Key Responsibilities

• Lay the foundation for the platform on which State Affairs will run operate
• Design and build distributed services (Node and TypeScript, Prisma, Postgres, Mongo) that ingest, enrich, and serve millions of documents
• Build large-scale distributed systems to handle petabyte content scale
• Raise expectations for code quality, reliability and product velocity
• Collaboratively, you will challenge yourself and peers to develop technically and professionally
• Lead by example on code quality via pair‑reviewing, writing generative tests, and mentoring teammates in modern TypeScript patterns
• Ship secure and compliant code by implementing security concepts to develop software dealing with sensitive data
• Operate by utilizing AI tools like Cursor, Claude‑Code, Copilot/Codex, or whatever comes next into your daily flow to increase iteration loops

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field
• 5+ years of professional work experience as an DevOps Engineer
• Professional work experience building production back‑ends in Node/TypeScript or a similar typed language
• Professional work experience shipping secure, audited systems such as SOC‑2, FedRAMP, or ISO 27001
• Knowledge of at least one SQL store, such as Postgres and a schema‑first mindset
• Ability to automate operational tasks such as deployment, testing, and monitoring (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and K8s)

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to build data pipelines (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent) and event‑driven architectures
• Ability to program using coding workflows by leveraging AI tools such as Cursor, Windsurf and/or Claude Code
• Professional work experience with document AI, search indexes (Elastic/Lucene), or knowledge graphs (e.g., Neo4j)
• Knowledge of Terraform
• Prior professional work experience in a start‑up organization

About State Affairs

We're building a category-defining business that will reshape America as we strengthen visibility into what's happening and why at the state level. This is an onsite work opportunity and our teams operate from the Washington, DC office (located at L and 15th St. NW).

Benefits

State Affairs offers a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package to employees. The annual salary range for this role as it is posted is $120,000 - $180,000 for candidates working from the State Affairs office in Washington, DC. The final job level and annual salary will be determined based on the education, qualification, knowledge, skills, ability, and experience of the final candidate(s), and calibrated against relevant market data and internal team equity.