Software Engineer

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 CEA The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) stewards the movement of people putting effective altruism principles into practice to solve the world's most pressing problems. We’re working to build a flourishing future by applying evidence, reason, and compassion to challenges like global poverty, animal suffering, and existential risks. Our work centers on growing and supporting a global community of people who rigorously analyze where they can do the most good – and take action on those insights. Current strategic priorities https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QkE35oTsasMn37o7R/stewardship-cea-s-2025-26-strategy-to-reach-and-raise-ea-s-1 include increasing understanding of effective altruism and its principles, growing the number of people who are motivated by EA principles to take significant action to address pressing problems, and diversifying funding sources for high-impact work. We had significant success in 2025, building momentum within CEA. Our headcount grew from 42 to 66 core staff. Participation in our programs (e.g., events, courses, groups) grew by 20-25% year over year. We merged https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BLvTcMMEQGFYsh6Jw/ea-funds-and-cea-are-merging with EA Funds https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/ and are rapidly scaling up our capacity for grantmaking and associated fundraising: our first Fund staffed with full-time employees (EA Animal Welfare Fund https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare), raised almost as much as the previous three years combined. In 2026, we’ve maintained ambitious momentum https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Dy4iGHbAkKAQ4t2Dw/building-sustainable-momentum-progress-report-on-cea-s-2025 while laying the foundations for a step-change in the wider EA ecosystem’s growth trajectory from 2027 onwards. 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 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/, and provide critical design and engineering capacity for other CEA projects such as the EA Newsletter https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-newsletter-archives, the EA Opportunities Board https://www.effectivealtruism.org/opportunities, and our courses https://www.effectivealtruism.org/courses. Over the last few years we’ve also redesigned and rebuilt effectivealtruism.org http://effectivealtruism.org, funds.effectivealtruism.org http://funds.effectivealtruism.org, and centreforeffectivealtruism.org http://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 https://github.com/oetherington, Senior Software Engineer, Agnes Stenlund https://www.linkedin.com/in/agnesstenlund/,Senior Product Designer, and Toby Tremlett https://www.linkedin.com/in/toby-tremlett-%F0%9F%94%B9-56a5b117a/, EA Forum Product Lead, and we plan to continue expanding in 2027. ABOUT THE ROLE CEA has ambitious goals https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Dy4iGHbAkKAQ4t2Dw/building-sustainable-momentum-progress-report-on-cea-s-2025 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 https://gitlab.com/eaforum/eaforum 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 https://www.effectivealtruism.org/opportunities and our courses https://www.effectivealtruism.org/courses who will continue driving these projects forwards – some of the changes they’re planning will require engineering. - EA Funds https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/ is now part https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BLvTcMMEQGFYsh6Jw/ea-funds-and-cea-are-merging 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 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DyncXLQ2ysb9K9dfR/you-need-user-buy-in-to-scale-your-impact 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 ca