Open Source work to improve government transparency

Are you interested in solving important problems? Looking to use your development skills to make a social impact?


Who we are

Critical Juncture works to support government transparency and improved healthcare outcomes through the design, development, and maintenance of award-winning, intuitive web applications. Our small team is able to do so through years of focus in these areas and through deep partnerships with domain experts. As a full-stack developer at Critical Juncture, you will be an integral part of a small and dynamic team that works on important problems every day.


The work

You will be developing and testing new features as well as scaling our microservice architecture (written in Ruby and deployed via Kubernetes). We’re built on top of AWS and make extensive use of open-source projects to support our services - technologies like Elasticsearch, Redis, and HAProxy. As part of a small team, you’ll be responsible for end-to-end implementation of new features, triaging errors and performance issues, digging through stack traces, and working with the team to improve both code quality and user interfaces.

Some challenges you’ll work on include:

  • Maintaining and evolving our internal and external APIs
  • Using and improving our data quality pipelines
  • Integrating with and upgrading our service-oriented, Kubernetes powered infrastructure
  • Using technology to improve access to and understanding of complex legal/regulatory information
  • Evaluating, using, and writing open-source software - all of our government-transparency related projects are open source
  • Using Elasticsearch to create powerful search features for both user interfaces and our APIs


Who we’re looking for

You are a developer with strong Ruby and Javascript fundamentals, an insatiable desire to learn, and high attention to detail. You get excited about translating domain knowledge into tools and user interfaces that allow our users to work more effectively. You believe that understanding why something does or doesn’t work is just as important as making it work in the first place. You are self-motivated, communicative, and comfortable working in a virtual environment. You love the challenge of working across a breadth of services and quickly assimilating bits of information into a coherent whole.


Minimum Qualifications
  • 5+ years Ruby/Ruby on Rails and Javascript work in professional environments
  • Strong communication skills, experience working in a remote-first environment
  • Solid grasp of underlying web standards (REST, AJAX, etc.)
  • Ability to follow team code standards and approaches - our projects are long-lived and code consistency is highly valued
Preferred Qualifications
  • Experience with test-driven development using RSpec
  • Familiarity with technologies such as Redis, Elasticsearch, Sidekiq, REST APIs, data processing


Job Details

Job Type: Full-time, 3-6 month contract, potential for extension
Job Location: Remote OK - team is located in SF Bay Area and works standard business hours on Pacific Time


To apply, please send the following to jobs[at]criticaljuncture.org:

  • Your resume
  • A cover letter
  • At least one link to code you’ve written


About Critical Juncture

Critical Juncture is a small technology company focused on creating real change through software. We enable our clients in government, healthcare, and education to distill massive datasets into understandable and actionable information through thoughtful partnership, modern web development and system architecture, and intuitive user interfaces. Our applications are used to improve maternal health outcomes at more than 90% of hospitals across California, Oregon and Washington, address educational equity at the Oakland Unified School District and Seattle Public Schools, and facilitate participation in the Federal regulatory process. Take a look at our work at www.criticaljuncture.org.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.