Software Engineer

Company: Centre for Effective Altruism Employment type: Full-time

We're hiring a Software Engineer to join a growing team building products that reach hundreds of thousands of people thinking about how to do the most good. This is an individual contributor role on our Online Team, and will be responsible for prioritizing and implementing impactful technical work at CEA. This position reports to the incoming Head of Digital Product. You will collaborate closely with our Senior Software Engineer, Senior Product Designer, and EA Forum Product Lead, along with other teams at CEA as needed. We’re aiming to hire a mid-level software engineer, but we would consider hiring at the senior level for the right candidate.

About the Online Team

The Online Team is a small, fast-paced tech and content team with the expertise to build and run web products that help support and grow the number of people engaging with and applying EA principles to their careers, research, and donations. We own and operate the EA Forum, and provide critical design and engineering capacity for other CEA projects such as the EA Newsletter, the EA Opportunities Board, and our courses. Over the last few years we’ve also redesigned and rebuilt effectivealtruism.org, funds.effectivealtruism.org, and centreforeffectivealtruism.org. The EA Forum in particular is one of the EA community building institutions with the widest reach, serving 700K annual visitors. As AI capabilities improve, we’re also exploring how integrating AI into CEA’s online product portfolio and internal tooling can help us have more impact. Our team currently consists of Ollie Etherington, Senior Software Engineer, Agnes Stenlund, Senior Product Designer, and Toby Tremlett, EA Forum Product Lead, and we plan to continue expanding in 2027.

About the role

CEA has ambitious goals for 2027 and beyond, and we need more software engineering capacity in order to reach those goals. We’re now looking to hire a full-stack engineer who can help make impactful improvements across all of our products. You’ll be implementing new features and bug fixes for various product managers, as well as proactively looking for ways to improve our online products yourself. You’ll be jointly responsible for DevOps, ensuring that all of our sites are fast and reliable, and you’ll take part in our weekly on-call rotation.

The vast majority of our code is written in TypeScript and is built on Node.js, React, Next.js, Postgres, and Elasticsearch. Our sites are hosted on Render, Vercel, and Cloudflare, and our analytics data is stored and processed in PostHog.

Some potential projects you may work on

• We’re deep in the process of migrating the EA Forum codebase over to Next.js – if you join, you can help us establish the next evolution of key EA community infrastructure, which we hope will set stronger foundations for many years to come.
• We’ve recently hired product managers for the EA Opportunities Board and our courses who will continue driving these projects forwards – some of the changes they’re planning will require engineering.
• EA Funds is now part of CEA, and has not had dedicated technical capacity in a long time. Their team would be excited to collaborate on how to make their processes more efficient using AI (they already have a long list of ideas!)
• In 2026, we’ve massively overhauled our analytics and data infrastructure, and we’d be excited for a data-minded engineer to continue pushing this project forward. Having a strong data foundation will be crucial for CEA’s ability to find product-market-impact fit to scale up our products.
• CEA is expecting to lean into virtual products in 2027, including running at least one major virtual event.

Key responsibilities

Provide engineering support for multiple CEA teams

• Implement features and fix issues in our current products to support the work of others on the team.
• Proactively collaborate with other CEA teams to understand where you can provide value and fill technical gaps, such as by building internal tooling.
• Ship reliable, maintainable production code, and address high-priority bugs when they come up. AI tools can make us faster, but our work still needs to hold up over time.
• Ensure that we’re collecting relevant metrics and analytics data, and that it can be used by non-technical members of staff to inform decision-making.
• Share our weekly on-call rotation with our Senior Software Engineer, Ollie, triaging incoming requests and responding to urgent issues.

Improve engineering infrastructure

• Help maintain and improve infrastructure, monitoring, deployments, and testing.
• Identify high-priority DX problems and develop solutions to help the team work more efficiently.
• Make justified and cost-effective decisions about what technologies and services we use to build our products.

What we’re looking for

We're hiring this role at either the Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer level. The core expectations below apply to both, with additional expectations for the senior level noted at the end.

Core expectations for both levels

• Solid full-stack engineering experience. You can independently build and maintain a product like an online forum (frontend, backend, databases, devops, and 3rd-party integrations). You explain your technical decisions clearly enough that teammates can push back. As a baseline, we expect you to be familiar with TypeScript, React, and Postgres, and that you can pick up our other technologies quickly. You write appropriate tests for new functionality.
• Impact focus. You care about real outcomes and not just shipped features. You gather data, evaluate your work, and iterate quickly. You're excited to explore new opportunities to use software to increase CEA’s impact.
• Autonomy. You're comfortable being one of two engineers in the organization, and can learn new skills as needed. You’re happy to own the technical-side of a project, working with non-technical product managers to implement ideas end-to-end, including proactively asking for support when necessary.
• AI fluency. You’ve used AI coding agents and have developed good judgment about where they help, where they fail, and how to verify their output. You can use them to speed up your work, but never at the expense of code architecture or maintainability.

Your candidacy will be stronger the more you also bring

• Devops. You have experience provisioning servers and databases for sites serving hundreds of thousands of active users. You can mitigate adversarial bot attacks, and set sensible, safe caching rules.
• Prioritization. You back-chain from organizational strategy to prioritize work on different products, and can work with product owners to provide realistic and achievable timelines for implementing changes and new features.
• Product thinking. You notice particularly good or bad user experiences and reflect on what makes them so, and you can combine these intuitions with targeted analytics data in order to tangibly improve products.

To be considered for the Senior level of this role, we require a candidate to meet the following criteria

• Architectural ownership. You have a track record of independently owning the technical direction of a significant project (such as a major refactor or a new product), being clear about the tradeoffs you made and how you will address key risks.
• A track record of impact. You have a history of shipping production work that mattered to real users, and can point to specific cases where your work moved real outcomes.
• Strategic autonomy. You can take technical ambiguity and turn it into a credible plan, including translating broad goals into quarterly OKRs and contributing to technical direction at the team level.

We can imagine being excited about candidates with a wide range of different skills and experience, and encourage you to apply even if you aren't sure that you're fully qualified.

Other information

• This is a full-time, remote position. We prefer applicants who are able to work in time zones between US Eastern Time and CET. We have an office in Oxford, UK, that you would have access to.
• Start date: January 2027 or sooner
• Reports to: Incoming Head of Digital Product (Joris Pijpers, Chief of Staff, Community Growth in the interim)

Compensation

• Software Engineer US: base salary of $134,900 and a 10% unconditional 401k contribution.
• Senior Software Engineer US: base salary of $166,725 and a 10% unconditional 401k contribution.
• For candidates outside the US, base salary is converted from USD to your local currency using a fixed exchange rate.

Benefits include private health insurance, flexible work hours, a $6,000 annual professional development allowance, a $6,000 mental health support allowance, extended parental leave, ergonomic equipment, 25 days of paid vacation or country-specific time off entitlements, whichever is greater.

This role will involve travel. There are likely 2-4 trips annually to attend team retreats and other events, including international trips.

Evaluation plan

We expect the interview process to include the following steps, subject to minor changes:

Application / Screening interview / Engineering interview / Pair programming task / Final interviews (2-3) / Reference checks