Software Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA
Role Type: Full-time, In Person
Duration: Flexible

Do you want to give a few months to a year (or more!) to help fix San Francisco? Do you want to work with a small, dedicated team to build tools that empower voters and improve local democracy? Are you a high-productivity IC that can build AI pipelines to help us analyze, understand, and fix local issues? If so, we want to hear from you!

About GrowSF

GrowSF is a lean data-driven policy & politics org with a single goal: fix the laws holding San Francisco back. We focus on winning local elections, giving voters clear and honest information, doing policy research, and passing (or repealing!) laws.

We're growing, and we’re looking for a Full Stack Software Engineer to help us build internal tooling, AI pipelines for research, and external resources for voters. This is a unique opportunity to leverage AI to shape our political work and products.

About the Role

This role is full-time, but flexible on duration. Do you want to give us three months and then go back to tech? Do you want to do six months, or a year? Give as many months as you want - we're open to anything!

As a Full Stack Software Engineer at GrowSF, you’ll build tools that strengthen civic engagement and local democracy. You’ll have the opportunity to work on high-impact products like our voter guides, polling dashboards, policy pipeline, and internal talent and campaign tools.

We’re a team of four. You’ll collaborate closely with our Co-Founders, our Head of Research, and Head of Talent. You’ll define technical architecture, ship production code, and make product decisions that will directly influence how thousands of San Franciscans engage with city politics.

You will:

• Help automate research: Create or fine-tune LLMs to analyze legislation, search city laws, do deep research on topics, extract policy insights, summarize complex documents, and find related news articles.
• Automate legislation, with understanding: Can you build something that will take "Make the zoning codes more permissive" and turn it into legislation?
• Build and launch tools for voters: Voters deserve the best tools for understanding their laws and what they're voting on. Build, test, and ship user-facing web apps to make government more legible to people.
• Turn government PDFs into structured data: Every week the SF government produces hundreds of PDFs containing useful data, but it's trapped. Find it, parse it, make it useful.

You must:

• Have high agency. If you need something, you figure out how to make it happen.
• Be comfortable with ambiguity
• Test your code
• Come in to the office 4 days per week
• Have some code samples we can review (our founders are also engineers)
• Be generally aligned with GrowSF's mission (though we never expect 100% alignment from anyone)

You should:

• Have a passion for San Francisco and local government
• Be comfortable working solo
• Enjoy working in a fast-paced environment
• Value pragmatism, clarity, and simplicity in software design
• Be comfortable with ambiguity and willing to ask questions, test assumptions, and work well self-directed, without lots of structure and direction

Bonus:

• Experience with civic tech, political tech, or campaigning tools (e.g., voter files)
• Have a deep interest in cities, politics, or public-interest technology, and some knowledge or experience with local issue advocacy
• Contributions to open-source projects or public civic data tools

To Apply

Send a résumé, GitHub, and why this role and our mission excite you to careers@growsf.org.