Tavern Research: Engineer II

Tavern Research:
Engineer II Location

311 SOUTH WACKER DRIVE, SUITE 440 IL

146, / Yearly

Tavern Research

Tech

Campaign

No additional instructions.

Engineer II

Location: Chicago, IL

Office: 3 days/week in South Loop office

Reports to: Engineering Team Lead

Salary Range: $146,500-$172,000 + Equity

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.

Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!

About You

You’re a mid-career engineer yearning to build things that matter and to use your engineering skills to have an immediate impact on the world. You’re past the “learning the ropes” stage and ready to own projects from concept to deployment, while still eager to keep leveling up. You’ve built enough to have opinions about tooling, trade-offs, and tech debt, and you know that sometimes the right answer is to hack something together and ship it by tomorrow.

You’re curious, adaptable, and maybe a little obsessive (in a good way). You can zoom out to think about the whole system, but you’ll happily spend an afternoon tracking down the one weird bug that’s making everything feel haunted. You don’t need every requirement spelled out; give you a problem and you’ll make something that works, then make it better.

You like solving problems no one else has quite figured out yet, especially when they’re messy, high-stakes, and politically relevant. You’re comfortable wearing a few hats: builder, debugger, tester, occasional mad scientist. You take pride in delivering things that actually get used.

AI is core to how we work. Our engineers use AI coding assistance as a standard part of their workflow. This role is a great fit if you’re excited to build with modern, AI-enabled tools and workflows.

About the role

As an Engineer II at Tavern, you’ll build tools that give our partners an edge in the noisy, chaotic world of politics, media, and influence. Some days, you’ll extend production systems to support new workflows; other days, you’ll prototype ideas that could become our next core product.

You’ll work on problems of moderate to wide scope, sometimes straightforward, sometimes full of unknowns, and you’ll be trusted to navigate both. That might mean stitching together APIs to move faster, integrating LLMs into new tools, or diagnosing why a data pipeline that ran perfectly yesterday is suddenly producing nonsense.

This role begins as a high-impact individual contributor position, but we value engineers who can mentor teammates, coordinate small project efforts, and grow into team leadership over time. If you’re excited by pairing technical depth with increasing ownership and leadership responsibility, this role offers a clear path in that direction.

You won’t just write code, you’ll help shape technical decisions. You’ll collaborate closely with product and engineering leadership to influence how we build, not just what we build. While remaining hands‑on day to day, you’ll be expected to anticipate bottlenecks, design with scale in mind, and ensure technical debt doesn’t outpace our velocity.

If building fast, shipping often, and learning from the weird and unexpected sounds exciting, we encourage you to apply.

We value in‑person collaboration and expect employees to work regularly from our Chicago office.

We’re hiring for multiple roles and reviewing applications on a rolling basis—if the posting is still up, the position is still open.

• Build and extend product features, balancing reliability with experimentation.
• Own and evolve core product features and systems, contributing to architectural decisions and carrying work…