Software Engineer

Overview

Software Engineer on CEA's Online Team, a small tech and content team that builds and runs web products such as the EA Forum, supporting engagement with effective altruism principles. The role is an individual contributor position reporting to the incoming Head of Digital Product.

What you'll do

• Implement features and fix bugs in CEA's online products to support the work of multiple teams and product managers.
• Proactively collaborate with other CEA teams to find where you can add value and fill technical gaps, such as by building internal tooling.
• Ship reliable, maintainable production code, and address high-priority bugs when they arise.
• Ensure relevant metrics and analytics data are collected and can be used by non-technical staff to inform decisions.
• Share a weekly on-call rotation with the Senior Software Engineer, triaging incoming requests and responding to urgent issues.
• Help maintain and improve infrastructure, monitoring, deployments, and testing.
• Identify high-priority developer experience problems and develop solutions that help the team work more efficiently.
• Make justified, cost-effective decisions about which technologies and services to use.
• Be jointly responsible for DevOps, ensuring all sites are fast and reliable.

What you'll need

• Solid full-stack engineering experience, able to independently build and maintain a product such as an online forum (frontend, backend, databases, devops, and third-party integrations).
• Ability to explain technical decisions clearly enough that teammates can push back.
• Familiarity with TypeScript, React, and Postgres, and ability to pick up other technologies quickly.
• Ability to write appropriate tests for new functionality.
• Impact focus: cares about real outcomes, gathers data, evaluates work, and iterates quickly.
• Autonomy: comfortable being one of two engineers in the organization, learning new skills as needed, owning the technical side of projects, and working with non-technical product managers end-to-end, including asking for support when necessary.
• AI fluency: has used AI coding agents and has good judgment about where they help, where they fail, and how to verify their output, without sacrificing architecture or maintainability.

Nice to have

• DevOps experience provisioning servers and databases for sites serving hundreds of thousands of active users, mitigating adversarial bot attacks, and setting sensible, safe caching rules.
• Prioritization: back-chains from organizational strategy to prioritize work across products and provides realistic timelines to product owners.
• Product thinking: notices particularly good or bad user experiences and combines these intuitions with targeted analytics data to improve products.

Details

• Full-time, remote position; preference for applicants able to work in time zones between US Eastern Time and CET.
• Access to an office in Oxford, UK.
• Start date: January 2027 or sooner.
• Reports to the Incoming Head of Digital Product (Joris Pijpers, Chief of Staff, Community Growth, in the interim).
• Travel: likely 2-4 trips annually for team retreats and other events, including international trips.
• Compensation (US): base salary of $134,900 plus a 10% unconditional 401k contribution. Candidates outside the US receive base salary converted from USD at a fixed exchange rate.
• Role may be filled at Senior Software Engineer level, with base salary of $166,725 for US candidates.