Job Opportunities
Be a part of the hippest, do-gooder tech firm in the DC area that helps organizations and campaigns organize online.
Our greatest strength lies not only within the greatness of the technology we produce, but within the greatness of our people. Seriously. We pride ourselves on our team of talented, driven, entrepreneurial individuals -- each of whom is deeply committed to the organizations which we serve and advancing our progressive ideals. We also have a workplace that values work/life balance, creativity and innovation. That combination is the key to our success and makes Salsa Labs not only an excellent place to work, but a highly efficient and productive company.
Here are the positions for which we are currently seeking candidates:
- Director of Nonprofit Business Development
Director of Nonprofit Biz Dev
Wired For Change is seeking an entrepreneurial and energetic manager to develop and lead its nonprofit sales and marketing efforts. The position’s overall purpose is to increase the number of Salsa users, enhance the Salsa brand reputation among nonprofits and industry partners, and to identify and pursue new strategic growth opportunities.
The successful candidate will have several solid years of experience selling products or services to nonprofits, or in a related consulting field, and will have a wide network of industry contacts. Previous online experience or in the SaaS environment will be a huge plus.
Working directly with the VP of Business Development and the Principals of WFC, the Director of Nonprofit Business Development will develop and implement an aggressive growth plan aligned with the company’s strategic goals.
Responsibilities:
- Craft and implement a strategic sales and marketing program to dramatically increase Salsa’s nonprofit user base
- Handle direct sales inquiries regarding system capacity, setup procedures, terms of service, needs assessment, etc.; and, participating in meetings with consultants and prospective users;
- Respond to RFPs from large nonprofits
- Hire and train nonprofit sales team over time
- Manage, develop, execute and evaluate marketing programs directed to prospective nonprofits, including lead generation campaigns, website oversight, email marketing
- Represent WFC at industry conferences and events
- Serve as the champion inside the organization for the needs of the nonprofit market and demand for new products
- Identify new opportunities with nonprofit organizations and with agencies that serve them -- including interactive marketing, consulting, tech and PR firms
- Meet individualized quarterly and annual growth targets
- Maintaining general expertise in current online communications practices and testing and implementing as many nontraditional marketing channels as possible
Qualifications:
An ideal candidate would have the following attributes:
- Several years of solid experience working with nonprofits in a sales, biz dev or marketing role
- Demonstrated ability to think on your feet, and to negotiate and close deals
- Strong relationship-building, consultative selling and client management skills
- Proven ability to establish and manage lasting partnerships
- Superb writing, presentation and public speaking skills
- Willingness to travel when necessary for in-person meetings and conferences
- A passion for cultivating new opportunities for growth and new revenue streams
- The integrity and flexibility (and humor!) necessary to address the practicalities of a growing firm, the respect to honor the impressive work done to date, and the ability to support the continued growth and direction of the organization.
- A commitment to the mission and values of the organization evidenced by a long-term commitment to the position
- Willingness to work on (part) commission-basis
In short, you will be expected to use your talents to get an ever-evolving line of products and services in the hands of as many nonprofits as possible, so they can grow and engage people online to advance their missions.
- Salsa Enterprise & Node Manager
Salsa Enterprise and Node Manager
Salsa Labs is seeking a tech-savvy individual with experience in online organizing to work with the Node Management team to provide timely and effective technical and strategic support for Enterprise and Node clients – both high-profile nonprofit and political organizations with large databases and complex online strategies. This is a great opportunity to gain invaluable experience working closely with a variety of organizations with sophisticated online organizing strategies.
The Enterprise and Node Manager will be assigned several clients for whom they will serve as the primary point of contact for all support questions, ongoing strategic advice and management of custom development projects. Additionally, they will provide backup technical support for other organizations, with additional duties of maintaining and updating quality documentation and serving as a liaison between the tech team and Salsa community.
Responsibilities:
- Provide strategic and technical advice to large clients on how they can be using Salsa tools more effectively for their online efforts through regular proactive phone or in-person meetings
- Quickly respond to support questions from specific clients with an immediate answer or indication that request has been triaged. (Support hours are 9am-6pm M-F EST, with occasional emergency support required after business hours and on weekends - approximately 2-4 hours per month).
- Ability to provide occasional after-hours emergency technical support for major issues (approximately 2-4 hours per month)
- Serve as a liaison between clients and tech staff to successfully accomplish custom development projects
- Test, troubleshoot and document bugs and feature improvements for existing and newly developed Salsa applications ("packages")
- Help clients measure and evaluate success (i.e. pulling custom queries from the database and analyzing)
- Developing case studies based on the success of clients
- Documenting and sharing best practices within the Salsa community
- Maintain and update support documentation in SalsaCommons.org <http://SalsaCommons.org>
- Monitor and comment on forum topics posted on SalsaCommons.org <http://SalsaCommons.org>
- Conduct online training and strategy sessions
Qualifications:
- Experience working with web-based services and technologies
- Excellent project management skills
- Knowledge of database operations – mySQL strongly preferred
- Working knowledge of HTML/CSS
- Willingness to learn new technologies
- Experience with online communication, organizing, advocacy and fundraising tactics, strategies and best practices
- Self motivation and ability to work in fast-paced environment with little supervision
- Understanding of the nonprofit sector and a commitment to helping progressive organizations and campaigns develop the most effective online programs as possible
- Strong verbal and written communication skills
- Ability to prioritize and juggle several competing priorities from multiple demanding clients at a time without dropping any balls
- The integrity and flexibility (and humor!) necessary to address the practicalities of a growing firm, the respect to honor the impressive work done to date, and the ability to support the continued growth and direction of the organization.
- A commitment to the mission and values of the organization evidenced by a long-term commitment to the position
- Political Business Development Associate
Political Business Development Associate Wired for Change is seeking an entrepreneurial and energetic individual to join our Business Development team. The position’s overall purpose is to increase the number of Salsa users, enhance the Salsa brand reputation among political campaigns and industry partners, and to identify and pursue new strategic growth opportunities.
The successful candidate will bring solid experience selling products or services to political or nonprofit organizations, an understanding of campaigns, an excellent professional reputation, a long-term career interest in politics and progressive causes, and a network of industry contacts. Previous online experience or in the SaaS environment will be a huge plus.
Job Responsibilities
- Handle direct sales inquiries regarding system capacity, setup procedures, terms of service, needs assessment, etc.; and, participating in meetings with consultants and prospective users;
- Respond to RFPs as needed
- Execute marketing programs directed to prospective political organizations, including lead generation campaigns, website oversight, email marketing
- Represent WFC at industry conferences and events
- Serve as a champion inside the organization for the needs of the political market and demand for new products
- Identify new opportunities with political organizations and with agencies that serve them -- including interactive marketing, consulting, tech and PR firms
- Meet individualized monthly, quarterly and annual growth targets
- Maintaining general expertise in current online communications practices and testing in order to bring marketing ideas to the SVP of WFC Business Development
Qualifications:
An ideal candidate would have the following attributes:
- Several years of solid experience working in a sales, biz dev or marketing role
- Demonstrated ability to think on your feet, and to negotiate and close deals
- Strong relationship-building, consultative selling and client management skills
- Proven ability to establish and manage lasting partnerships
- Superb writing, presentation and public speaking skills
- Willingness to travel when necessary for in-person meetings and conferences
- A passion for cultivating new opportunities for growth and new revenue streams
- The integrity and flexibility (and humor!) necessary to address the practicalities of a growing firm, the respect to honor the impressive work done to date, and the ability to support the continued growth and direction of the organization.
- A commitment to the mission and values of the organization evidenced by a long-term commitment to the position
- Willingness to work on (part) commission-basis
- Salsa Support Specialist
Salsa Support Specialist
DemocracyInAction is seeking a tech-savvy individual with experience in online organizing to work with the client services team to provide timely and effective technical and strategic support for Salsa users. This is a great opportunity to gain invaluable experience working closely with a variety of organizations with sophisticated online organizing strategies. The Salsa Support Specialist will assist with front line technical support, tracking support requests, maintaining and updating quality documentation and serving as a liaison between the technical team and the Salsa community.
Responsibilities may include but are not limited to:
- Triage support requests as they come in via phone and e-mail
- Resolve or delegate support issues
- Resolve escalated tickets related to tier/responsibility
- Assist in resolving other escalated tickets whenever possible
- Document and report on usage of software and user preferences
- Maintain and update support documentation in SalsaCommons.org
- Monitor and comment on forum topics posted on SalsaCommons.org
- Conduct online training and strategy sessions
Necessary Skills
- Strong verbal and written communication skills; pleasant phone manner
- Excellent problem solving skills
- Ability to work well and maintain a calm manner under pressure
- Experience working with web-based services and technologies
- Understanding of the nonprofit sector and, in particular, advocacy organizations
- Self-motivation and ability to work in a fast-paced environment with little supervision
- HTML proficiency required
- Willingness to learn new technologies
- Commitment to our mission to help organizations effectively organize online
Preferred Skills
- Knowledge of DemocracyInAction’s Salsa or other online CRM
- Basic knowledge of Internet technologies: TCP/IP, DNS and routing, SSH, etc.
- Knowledge of HTML/CSS, and HTML email design
- Prior experience with MySQL or other relational databases
- UI Engineer
UI Developer
Wired for Change is looking for a stellar individual to join its team as a User Interface Developer. This is a rare opportunity to have a sizable role in a massive, ongoing development project to build an online organizing platform capable of transforming the way campaigns and organizations target and mobilize their constituencies both online and off.
Responsibilities:
- Design and tweak application user interfaces for new and existing Salsa organizing tools
- Work with product and project managers to ensure that user interfaces conform to client needs
- Rapidly create of HTML mockups for design reviews for new proofs-of-concept or feature prototypes
- Create of graphics for application interface
- Coordinate with UI Lead to ensure that usability efforts proceed on schedule
Qualifications:
- Strong knowledge of CSS and HTML
- Basic JavaScript knowledge
- Experience with web site design, including page code creation
- Flexibility to adjust to changes and critique over the course of a project
- Online Community Manager
Wired for Change is seeking a tech-savvy individual, with marketing, online communication and organizing experience to manage its online community of over 10K Salsa users on SalsaCommons.org. This is an exciting role that encompasses many aspects of our work with nonprofits and political organizations. This position will serve as a hub and a voice of the company externally and of our users internally. In this role, you’ll need to simultaneously serve as:
Community Advocate
As a community advocate, the community managers’ primary role is to represent our users. This includes listening, monitoring, and being active in understanding what users are saying in both on SalsaCommons as well as externally. You’ll engage users by responding to their requests and ideas, both in private and in public. You’ll also be responsible for gathering the requirements of the community in a responsible way and presenting it to product teams. This may involve formal product requirements methods from surveys to focus groups, to facilitating the relationships between the product development team and users.
Evangelist
In this evangelistic role, you will promote events, products and upgrades to users and partners by using traditional marketing tactics and conversational discussions. You’ll work to gain a high degree of trust among users with the goal to turn each of them into a Salsa evangelist.
Communicator & Marketer
You’ll be very familiar with the tools of communication, from forums, to blogs, to video, to twitter, and understand how to communicate effectively with nonprofits and campaigns. You’ll also responsible for engaging our User Advisory Council and Partners on SalsaCommons. You’ll also help develop the editorial strategy and planning and will work with many internal stakeholders to identify content, plan, publish, and follow up.
Specific Responsibilities:
- Gain expert knowledge of the Salsa platform
- Create and carrying out a strategic plan for SalsaCommons.org
- Develop a space for posting and voting on new feature requests
- Maintain up-to-date and accessible documentation
- Build a resource sharing section and success sharing section for each product
- Serve as the initial point of contact for inbound requests on SalsaCommons
- Identify and analyze issues, patterns and trends in requests & product performance
- Transfer the information to the appropriate departments so that they can respond accordingly:
o bugs to QA
o new ideas to product development
o messaging effectiveness to marketing
o frequently asked questions noted
o identifying user generated content
- Author blog posts, articles, tweets, videos, etc – whatever media you want to use – to communicate creative uses of Salsa from the simple to the very complex
- Establish metrics & report on them on a monthly basis including recommendations
- Identify & engage advocates and User Advisory Committee
- Proactively escalate issues, observations, opportunities, and insights to the Director of Client Services
- Stay up to date on new social media tools and best practices
- Organize in-person user events and represent company at outside events where our users are involved
Qualifications:
- You love helping people and find it rewarding to creatively solve people’s problems. Then you love to proactively use that experience to make the whole service better.
- You like working hard and thrive on the excitement of a goal-oriented team
- You are an independent, creative self-starter who loves running with things while keeping everyone inside and outside the company in the loop.
- You love to write & enjoy sharing your ideas with others.
- You spend a lot of time online and stay up-do-date on new, fun things out there for web savvy users.
- You will have experience working with nonprofit organizations and understand the basic principals of online organizing, advocacy, and fundraising.
- You will have working knowledge of Salsa or the ability to quickly learn it!
- You have (preferably advanced) knowledge of HTML/CSS
- You will not be afraid to learn new technologies
Seth Godin calls the Online Community Manager the #1 Job of the Future. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/07/jobs-of-the-fut.html
- Software Engineer (s)
Got Tech Skills? Fed up with politics these days? Tired of rising unemployment, rising energy costs, declining home values, wars, global poverty, global warming? Yes??
NOW IS THE TIME to put your technical skills to use to help build a progressive movement and make a real difference!
Salsa Labs is seeking top-notch developers to join our fast-growing SaaS/ Platform-as-a-Service organizations that help a large network of progressive organizations and campaigns successfully grow and organize online. Our platform, Salsa, is what over 1K groups currently build their online strategy on top of to engage over 40M individuals.
**note: if you are not looking for a full-time job, but want to put your tech skills to use with a low barrier to entry, please click here to find out how you can develop applications on Salsa.**
SalsaScript is our programming language that allows it to happen quickly and cheaply -- lowering the barrier to entry for developers. It's based on Javascript and we’ve added things like database access, permissions, utility functions, and includes, labeled it SalsaScript, and execute it on our servers. It’s a cutting-edge solution with high-growth potential that we think can revolutionize technology development for our sector and far beyond.
We are looking for several full-time developers who will be responsible for supporting and building new applications on the Salsa platform. Our development style is agile and we roll out new code weekly – none of those protracted release cycles of the past. The positions require a strong technical background and candidates must be capable of independently solving complex technical problems and communicate clearly and effectively to both techies and non-techies.
We're looking for folks who share our vision, will contribute to our growth and success and to the success of the organizations we work with. This is a great opportunity to work for some really great causes and use your tech skills for good!
Skills Should Include:
- 2 years+ software application development and database skills (JSP/PHP/Python/Ruby) for Junior Developer positions, 5 years + for more Senior roles.
- Knowledge and experience with front-end web applications, HTML and Javascript. Javascript development beyond basic mouseovers a plus.
- The ability to carry out relational database design, some user interface experience design, and QA.
- MySQL knowledge preferred, but not required. Basically, if you know why a "select count(*)" is bad on a million row table, you're on the right path. If you know what this means: "ps -ef | grep java", you've got the linux/server skill level we're looking for.
- Familiarity and/or interest in learning and experimenting with the latest tech applications and working with multiple APIs.
- Excellent project management and communications skills. Candidates should have the ability to speak effectively with non technical staff, use creativity and a high degree of technical and professional judgment in order to resolve software problems in non-routine situations.
- Interest in or knowledge of nonprofits/politics and technology is preferred.
- Systems Administrator - Entry Level
Systems Administrator Wired For Change is seeking a dedicated individual with experience in systems administration to work on a team supporting its Salsa platform. This is a great opportunity to gain invaluable experience working with all manner of technologies in a dynamic, fast-paced environment. The Systems Administrator will assist with issues pertaining to the Salsa production network as well as our Dupont Circle office network and desktop systems. Specifically, the position is responsible for system updates, system uptime/availability, network issues, and backups. You will have the opportunity to explore new technologies, as well as new software offerings from various software vendors we work with.
General Responsibilities Include:
* Ensuring our application is running per SLAs.
* Maintaining hardware which we own.
* Patching and updating our operating environments to ensure stability and security.
* Management of production network.
* Management of system storage.
* Provisioning of new systems.
* Scheduling and performing backups.
* Technical support for in-house staff.
* Working with large-scale mail server and keeping up with spam issues.
* 24x7x365 on-call support of this environment.
* Ability to occasionally report to Reston, VA data center for both normal maintenance and emergency support.
Required Skills (1 - 2 years’ work experience):
* Previous experience working with Linux in a production environment (preferrably RedHat Enterprise or Fedora).
* Previous experience working with MySQL 5.x (large databases).
* Previous experience working with firewalls, network switches, and routers.
* Previous experience working solely on the command line.
* Excellent troubleshooting skills.
* For in-house desktop support, previous experience with Mac OS X and Windows is a plus.
* Willingness to work in a fast, paced, dynamic environment where uptime is key and dedication is a must.
- Lead Product Manager
Lead Product Manager
Think software should work differently? Got a vision, the tech chops to structure it, and the ability to convince others it's important?
WiredForChange is seeking a Product Manager to drive Salsa packages from specs to deployment. The ideal candidate has some background actually writing software (off-hour side projects don't quite cut it), the ability to explain why a feature belongs -- or doesn't, and the guts to cut critical features to hit a deadline. Familiarity with the online organizing space is best - familiarity with building web applications is a must.
Some responsibilities .....
- Collection and prioritization of requirements from prospects, clients, domain experts, technology visionaries, market experts, products from competing vendors, etc.
- Developing product specs, and convincing smart engineers that the specs aren't junk
- Monitoring new technologies and how to integrate them into the product
- Evangelizing new products within the company -- and to the outside
You will work with ...
- The CTO and engineering team to make sure your vision is turning out as you hope
- The marketing and outreach team to position the product, and come up with materials and talking points
- The support team to identify feature gaps, support headaches, and documentation
We are an organization that operates with the soul of a nonprofit and the savvy of a business. People who thrive here are those who enjoy doing good in a fast-moving (sometime chaotic) working environment that’s always focused on growing and achieving results.
Wired for Change and DemocracyInAction are equal opportunity employers and seek to build a diverse staff representative of the communities they serve. Women, minorities, LGBT are strongly encouraged to apply.
In additional to our casual (dog friendly!) work environment we have an excellent benefits package that includes:
- 3 weeks of paid vacation (4 weeks after two years)
- 14 paid holidays (includes 3 days between Christmas and New Year's)
- Paid sick leave
- Paid time off for volunteer opportunities
- CareFirst Health and Dental insurance
- Flex Time / Telecommuting options
- Metro SmartBenefits
- 401K with percentage matching benefits
Please send a cover letter describing your interest and qualifications (we won't even look at your application without a cover letter), your resume (in .doc or pdf format), salary requirements to: jobs@wiredforchange.com; No phone calls please.
