Technical Generalist & Chief of Staff

About the role

This is the first intern hire at WhosMyRep.org, working directly with the founder. You'll help build, run, and grow the entire product — moving between data engineering, product, content strategy, and UX, often within the same day.

Two things make this different from a normal "technical generalist" job:

• You'll be able to run the whole thing without me. The founder may periodically be pulled into other work for stretches at a time. During those stretches, you are WhosMyRep.org — the supervisor of daily data collection, the fact-checker of the daily digest, the sender of newsletters, and the maintainer of the site, all on your judgment. This is a chief-of-staff role as much as an engineering one.
• Editorial and political judgment matter as much as code. Every day we publish an AI-drafted digest of what Congress is doing. The hard part isn't generating it — it's catching what's wrong: an AI hallucination, a member's spin repeated as fact, a court ruling described as doing something it wasn't. You need to read the primary source (the bill, the ruling, the roll call), know congressional nuance, and protect a nonpartisan, defamation-careful voice.

Responsibilities

Data & content pipeline

• Run and maintain the daily pipeline that collects what members of Congress say and do — public posts, votes, and legislative activity.
• Use LLM APIs to draft digestible summaries of complex political topics — then review them for accuracy against primary sources, flagging hallucinations and misstatements.
• Own the data infrastructure end to end: the data warehouse, scheduled collection jobs, and the analytics that track engagement and content performance.

Product development

• Own the full stack, front end to deploys. (We're deliberately light on implementation details in a public posting — serious candidates get a full architecture walkthrough.)
• Make rapid UI/UX decisions and implement them directly. Balance information density with accessibility.
• Build systems that scale from MVP to production without over-engineering.

Content & growth operations

• Run the semi-automated newsletter system that delivers personalized political updates to readers by district and state.
• Create SEO-optimized digest pages with social sharing; generate social assets; grow reach.
• Balance editorial judgment with data-driven decisions.

Run it when I'm away (the chief-of-staff part)

• Own the daily publishing loop end-to-end and keep it reliable — no silent data gaps, no inaccurate posts shipped in our voice.
• Document what's in the founder's head into runbooks as you learn it, so nothing depends on one person.
• Make architectural and editorial calls with incomplete information, and know what to skip.

Requirements

• Strong programming fundamentals — JavaScript and Python required.
• Experience shipping a consumer-facing web product end to end (a side project people actually use counts).
• Comfort with APIs, data pipelines, SQL, and at least one front-end framework.
• Active, close engagement with political news and congressional process — and the ability to spot inaccuracies in AI-generated content and in members' own framing.
• Instinct for reading a primary source (a ruling, a report, a roll call) rather than trusting a summary.
• Design sensibility, a bias toward action, and genuine interest in civic technology and political transparency.

Qualifications

You probably are:

• Early-career or self-taught — we care about what you've built, not years logged. Backgrounds that tend to fit: data science / statistics, government or political science, or the combination.
• Someone who's built side projects that people actually use.
• Comfortable being the only technical person in the room, and steady when priorities shift fast.
• More interested in impact than perfect code — and trustworthy with editorial independence and discretion.

Schedule

Internship: August 15 – December 15, 2026. Austin-based, in-person or hybrid. Full-time.

Pay

Founding-team role: $85–95k salary.