Engineer I, Surveys

Location: Chicago, IL. 

Office: 3 days/week in South Loop office

Reports to: Director of Engineering, Measurement & Insights

About Tavern Research

Tavern Research is a political tech startup building tools and insights to help our customers win elections and make better, evidence-based decisions. We specialize in scaling expert human work, such as content generation and survey research to support thoughtful, data-driven civic engagement. We're a venture-backed, mission-driven, fast-moving, and mostly technical team focused on supporting campaigns and organizations working to strengthen democratic participation. We are experimental by design and expect every team member to continuously improve how they work using new tools and technology. Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!

About You

You’re early in your engineering career and hungry to  to use your engineering skills to have an immediate impact on the world.You might not have seen every design pattern or system failure yet, but you learn fast, ask good questions, and aren’t afraid to dive into a codebase to figure out how it really works.

You’re curious, adaptable, and energized by the idea that code can drive real-world outcomes. You don’t just want to polish small bugs in the background. You want ownership, responsibility, and the opportunity to level up quickly by working alongside experienced engineers and shipping work that has visible impact.

At Tavern, skills matter more than credentials. We don’t care if you took a non-traditional path or left school early. Our engineers use AI coding agents almost exclusively — we’re constantly testing new models and new workflows, and coding by hand is a distant memory around here. If that excites you, you’ll fit right in.

Political experience is a plus, not a requirement. If our mission resonates with you, we encourage you to apply, even if you don’t check every box.

About the Role 

As an Engineer I at Tavern, you’ll be a core builder on the team, turning real requirements into working software, and understanding why we’re building what we’re building.

This is a hands-on, execution-focused role. You’ll write production code, write tests, and help get features across the finish line. You’ll work closely with senior engineers who will review your work, challenge your thinking, and help support your technical growth.

Your work might include building a new step in our survey editor, moving a weighting calculation into our dbt pipeline, or hardening our fielding systems against fraud.

We value in-person collaboration and expect regular time in our Chicago office. We’re hiring multiple engineers and reviewing applications on a rolling basis—if the posting is still up, the position is still open.

About the Team: Surveys

You’d be joining the team that builds Surveyor, Tavern’s end-to-end platform for designing, fielding, weighting, and reporting on survey research — plus the automated data-and-modeling framework the rest of the company uses to analyze results.

Lately we’re focused on making research faster and more self-serve (AI-assisted survey generation, a cleaner survey editor, an external beta so clients can run surveys themselves), building an automated data & modeling pipeline (moving weighting, toplines, and crosstabs into a reproducible dbt/BigQuery pipeline), and hardening the platform to scale (billing, fielding automation, fraud prevention, reliability, and observability). As Tavern’s largest and most mature product, Surveys is often the testbed for new capabilities before the rest of the company adopts them.

Responsibilities

• Translate product and internal requirements into clean, functioning code that ships to production.
• Work closely with the engineering team to implement solutions, write unit tests, and participate in code reviews.
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues in production, contributing to the stability and reliability of our tools.
• Use LLMs and AI coding tools to accelerate development and continuously expand your technical skill set.
• Actively participate in planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives to improve how we build and ship software.

Qualifications

• 0-2+ years of relevant experience, with an emphasis on demonstrated ability rather than tenure.
• Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, and Docker.
• Experience working with and deploying LLMs or agentic, AI-assisted systems.
• Experience building backend systems, including working with databases, APIs, and infrastructure, with a solid understanding of core data structures and algorithms.
• Experience with (or strong interest in) data pipelines and modeling tools such as SQL, dbt, or BigQuery, and an interest in survey methodology, is a plus.
• Familiarity with modern development tools such as Docker, GCP, Git/version control, and basic CI/CD workflows.
• Ability to manage multiple projects and priorities simultaneously in a fast moving environment.

To be explicit, you don’t need a degree to work here. You just need to be good at the things we’re asking from you.

Benefits

• Premium health insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Office closed for all federal holidays
• 401k match
• Equity
  
  

Tavern Research is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.