Position Summary

As Head of Engineering, you'll set the technical strategy for America's most comprehensive anti-trafficking data platform. You'll oversee both software and data engineering to build user-facing applications and data infrastructure that directly impact victim identification, resource allocation, and trafficking prevention across a national network of 200+ partners. This role combines strategic technical leadership with hands-on engineering to scale systems that help save lives.

About Allies Against Slavery

Since 2010, Allies Against Slavery has worked to break down silos and build networks that shine a light on human trafficking. We harness data to make victims visible and accelerate solutions that free people from exploitation. Our flagship platform, Lighthouse, serves 200+ partners across three states with integrated datasets from 40+ sources, providing unprecedented visibility into trafficking patterns for law enforcement, social services, and researchers.

Why This Role Matters

You will own and define the technical strategy for the national data ecosystem combating human trafficking. We're scaling Lighthouse to serve every community in America, and you'll be the technical decision-maker driving this expansion from 3 states to national coverage.

Your strategic technical decisions directly translate to screenings that identify trafficking victims, real-time insights that help allocate resources and prosecute traffickers, and prevention of exploitation before it happens. You're the technical leader building foundational infrastructure that helps save lives.

Your Strategic Authority & Impact

As Head of Engineering, you will set the technical strategy for a national movement. This position gives you the authority and responsibility to make critical technical decisions about data architecture, infrastructure, and product development. You'll be the primary technical decision-maker who combines deep engineering expertise with strategic thinking about scaling data solutions.

You will lead the evolution of our technical foundation, advancing the systems that enable our data products to deliver maximum impact in combating human trafficking.

As the lead engineering decision-maker on the Allies team, you'll guide our Data Scientist and provide technical direction to our software development partner, AnnieCannons. You'll collaborate strategically with our Executive team, including our Chief Product Officer and our Chief Impact Officer.

The Technical Challenge

We're solving one of the hardest problems in data engineering: creating a secure, scalable platform that ingests sensitive data from dozens of disparate sources (law enforcement, social services, courts, NGOs) while maintaining strict privacy controls and enabling real-time analysis for high-stakes decisions.

Our flagship platform, Lighthouse, aggregates multiple data sources to create the country's most comprehensive anti-trafficking data ecosystem. Currently deployed across Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, Lighthouse makes data and insights on human trafficking current, accessible, and actionable for 200+ partners. We're scaling this platform to serve as a national source of reliable data and credible insights.

As the technical decision-maker, you'll architect and guide systems that handle:

• Multi-jurisdictional data across federal, state, and local agencies
• Real-time screening tools used by frontline workers to identify victims
• Complex analytical workloads for researchers and policymakers
• Strict compliance requirements for sensitive trafficking data
• National-scale infrastructure as we expand from 3 states to new markets

Our current infrastructure operates as a modern cloud SaaS platform on AWS, integrating our 40+ data sources through a PostgreSQL database and AWS-native services. As we scale nationally, you’ll lead the evolution of our stack—currently piloting Snowflake, Airbyte, and dbt, while advancing AI/ML capabilities through Snowpark, Amazon SageMaker, and LLM integrations to power natural language data interaction via LLM-powered agents. You'll validate these design decisions, make strategic adjustments, and drive the implementation of our next-generation architecture.

In this role, you'll drive technical decisions across our: cloud data architecture, data ingestion pipelines with real-time processing, machine learning pipelines, full-stack applications, APIs, data visualization platforms, and security infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Technical Leadership & Decision-Making

• Own and define the strategy & evolution of our technical infrastructure and user-facing platforms
• Set technical direction and create technical roadmaps for product and infrastructure evolution and modernization
• Provide technical leadership to internal and external engineering teams
• Drive technical strategy in collaboration with data scientists and analysts to translate research insights into production-ready applications
• Partner with Chief Product Officer on commercial strategy and technical roadmap
• Set standards and direction for external vendor relationships and technology integrations

Data Architecture & Infrastructure

• Own and refine the architecture of cloud-native data systems for sensitive multi-jurisdictional data
• Lead data strategies for ingestion, transformation, processing, and visualization of diverse data sources
• Set and enforce data governance and security protocols for sensitive trafficking data
• Make infrastructure decisions enabling national-scale platform growth

Full-Stack Technical Leadership & Hands-On Engineering

• Translate business requirements into comprehensive technical solutions spanning data and software
• Architect and enhance user-facing platforms for data visualization, analytics, and self-service capabilities
• Lead development of data-driven applications and APIs that integrate external data sources and partner systems
• Optimize data storage, retrieval, and processing performance for large-scale datasets and high-traffic applications
• Design and implement automated monitoring and alerting systems to ensure data integrity across platforms
• Set QA standards and strategies, including automated testing frameworks, regression testing, and continuous integration testing
• Actively seek out and leverage new technologies, including AI tools, to accelerate product development cycles, enhance team productivity, and drive innovation
• Guide the team through complex data & software engineering challenges while maintaining hands-on technical contributions

Qualifications

Required:

• 5+ years in full-stack engineering or software development with demonstrated technical leadership experience and the ability to guide teams through complex data engineering challenges
• Strong proficiency in JavaScript, SQL, and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)
• Expert knowledge of data processing frameworks (Spark, Kafka, Airflow) and modern software practices
• Proven experience designing and building end-to-end data pipelines
• Experience with data warehousing solutions (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery), Python, PostgreSQL, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), APIs, microservices, and web applications
• Deep understanding of data security, privacy, compliance, and comprehensive testing strategies
• Demonstrated ability to guide teams through complex data engineering challenges while remaining hands-on

Preferred:

• ML infrastructure and AI model deployment experience
• Modern web frameworks (React, Vue.js, Django, Flask) and API development (REST, GraphQL)
• Mission-driven organization or social impact experience
• Data visualization tools and custom dashboard development
• Product management and technical roadmap planning in data-driven environments
• Experience setting technical strategy in fast-growing organizations

What We Offer

Strategic Leadership: Shape technical direction, set engineering standards, mentor teams, present at conferences, and drive commercial strategy

Technical Ownership: Full authority to grow and innovate our data architecture to serve a national movement with cutting-edge technologies and real-world consequences

Mission Alignment: Work with survivor leaders, see direct impact in lives saved, join trusted government partnerships

Competitive Package: Market-rate compensation for similar social impact engineering leadership roles, comprehensive benefits, flexible and hybrid work

Ready to Lead the Technical Future?

This is a once-in-a-career opportunity to use your technical leadership skills to create lasting change. You'll own the technical strategy and make the critical decisions that shape the data infrastructure helping America see, understand, and stop human trafficking.

The challenge is immense. The impact is measurable. The mission is urgent.

Join us in building a future where every community has the data it needs to protect the most vulnerable and prevent human trafficking.

Allies Against Slavery is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, inclusion, and creating a workplace where all team members can thrive. We strongly encourage applications from individuals with lived experience of trafficking or marginalization.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. The employer will not sponsor visas for this position.

Apply now to join the team tackling one of society's most pressing problems.