Engineer II

Engineer II

Location : Chicago, IL

3 days / week in South Loop office

Reports to : Tavern Labs Director of Engineering

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

Start Date : ASAP

About Tavern Research

Tavern Research is a political tech startup that builds tools and insights to help our customers win elections and make better decisions. We specialize in scaling expert human work, like content generation and survey research. We're a venture-backed, mission driven, fast-moving, mostly technical team focused on supporting winning campaigns. Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!

About You

You're past the "learning the ropes" stage and are 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 act 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.

We expect all of our engineers to use AI coding assistance as a core part of their workflow. If you're not interested in working this way, this probably isn't the right role. >

About the Role As an Engineer II at Tavern, you'll build the tools that give our partners an edge in the noisy, chaotic world of politics, media, and influence. Some days, you'll extend a production system to handle new workflows. Others, you'll prototype an idea that just might 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 make something work faster, integrating LLMs into a new tool, or figuring out why the data pipeline that ran perfectly yesterday is suddenly spitting out nonsense.

While this role starts as a high-impact individual contributor position, we value engineers who can mentor teammates, coordinate small project teams, and step into a team lead capacity, either now or in the near future. If you're excited by the idea of pairing technical depth with leadership responsibilities, this role offers a clear path to grow in that direction.

You won't just write code and toss it over the wall, you'll collaborate with other engineers, product folks, and sometimes clients to make sure what you build solves the right problem. You'll work mostly independently on day-to-day tasks, get general guidance for new territory, and have senior teammates to lean on when you need a second set of eyes.

If the idea of 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.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend product features, balancing reliability with experimentation.
• Independently own small-to-medium projects end-to-end, from design through deployment, incorporating user and client feedback.
• Work across a moderate-to-wide scope of problems, handling both straightforward tasks and areas with significant unknowns.
• Contribute to testing, code review, and stability practices, helping improve team standards.
• Prototype and experiment with new ideas and technologies (e.g., APIs, LLMs, AI coding tools, data pipelines).
• Collaborate with product and engineering peers, and occasionally clients, to ensure solutions solve the right problems.
• Identify and propose improvements to tools, workflows, and systems.
• Provide mentorship and coordination, supporting junior teammates and small project groups.

Qualifications We know it's rare to check every box. If you meet most of these, we encourage you to apply :

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

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