Classically Trained Engineer

TL;DR:

We’re looking for a generalist full stack developer from a traditional background that wants to make a difference. Come join us to build a platform to radically improve service delivery and increase funding to the charity sector.

What we need:

• Years of experience is a poor metric for discovering quality. Ideally you’ve worked a job before, even more ideally you’ve shipped a product from start to end solo. This is the job for you if you want to ship & get it right first time.

• We’re aiming to build an engineering team with high a weight to power ratio. You aren’t going to be in meetings 7 hours a day, there is no daily scrum, you will not be writing design documents. Our goal is to produce quality software, and to get it into the hands of our users as fast as it’s ready.

• When we say we’re looking for a ‘Classically trained software engineer’ what we mean is we want you to have a pretty broad knowledge and ideally done a Computer Science degree. We’re looking for a heavy hitter who can move between frontend/backend/dev ops or at least backs themselves to be able to do it. We’re looking for broad exposure but general ability over someone who’s specialised.

• We’re laissez faire on whether you use AI tooling; if you want to hotspot cursor on the Avanti West Coast line back from Warrington in order to solve a clients issue, we 100% back you (It just better be good code).

⏳ Plinth:

What we do

The charity sector is huge. In total income, it’s twice the size of the advertising, fashion and restaurant industries, combined . But it’s also extremely underserved by tech platforms to support the work they do.

That’s what we’re solving. An AI platform for all charities, particularly the smaller, local organisations. That saves them from millions of hours of bureaucracy, helps more people access their services, and supports them to get more funding.

️ The product

We’re not a simple point solution. It’s a comprehensive platform, solving everything from safeguarding information, writing funding applications, taking bookings for venues/activities, giving grants and statutory reporting on Government contracts.

It becomes the system of record for the organisations we work with. On top of this record, we’re building tools to allow charities to deeply understand their impact (with mapping, visualisation and analysis) and to use this information to get more funding — through generating impact reports and funding applications with AI.

Where we’re up to

We’re a team of 10. We have over 1,500 charities and 45 foundations using the platform, and we’re working with funders powering £55 million worth of charitable funding annually, which is growing 4x every year.

➡️ What’s next

Our focus is on two things:

• Improving the core data collection platform — the quality of the impact reports and the analysis we do depends on the platform for charities being robust, reliable and easy to use. Since 90%+ of charities don’t pay for the platform, we also can’t afford to provide intensive onboarding and support, so the platform needs to be intuitive and self-explanatory.

• Going deep on AI features — outside of the most Effective Altruism-adjacent organisations, in the main, the charity sector runs on natural language and subjective fuzziness. Case studies and narratives often drive decision making and research is typically conducted more qualitatively than quantitatively. Not much gets done with any of this information, because it can’t be analysed at scale. At this point, even a hermit or a monk knows this has changed dramatically, and gives us a huge opportunity.

Our values

• Charities come first . While they don’t pay us, they are the people we need to be focusing on: supporting them to work towards their own missions more effectively. Being trusted by them is the most important thing.

• Childish enthusiasm is better than professional cynicism.

• Open and transparent . Better to be appear dumb than pretend you understand.

• Never the delay . Things move slowly in our sector, but we're not going to be responsible for it. We need to be unreasonably fast.

• Driven by the mission . We're going to work hard, because getting this right could be massive.

• There are no ninjas, there is no door. We need to figure out how to solve the tricky problems ourselves, because no one else is going to.

The role

• Writing front-end and back-end code in JavaScript and Typescript.

• Shaping the architecture for new and existing features.

• Writing tests, documentation and showcasing to the rest of the team.

• Building tool to support onboarding new customers, as we help more and more people migrate off existing systems.

What we’re looking for

• Someone who can build reusable infrastructure with sensible interfaces that’s easy for team members (both human and AI) to build on top of.

• Willing to take on complex features from the initial idea to maintaining them in production.

• Multiple years experience shipping code and managing complex systems.

• Familiarity with React, ideally some experience of Elasticsearch.

• All of the standard stuff: Git, agile, testing, etc etc

• Ideally, some experience with the charity sector, either in employment, or as a volunteer/trustee.