GiveDirectly (GD) aims to reshape international giving - and millions of lives - by allowing donors to provide capital grants directly to the world's poorest. The Brookings Institution estimates that $70B of cash transfers would be required to eliminate the poverty gap; the aid sector currently spends $135B each year, much of which is allocated to evidence-free interventions.
Job Description
- Technology will play a critical role in enabling the next generation of cash delivery: from identifying recipients without needing to knock on doors to a modern payments infrastructure that gets dollars in recipients’ hands faster and more scalably.
- We are seeking a software engineer to help design and build our systems for identifying, enrolling, and paying recipients.
- You’ll have the opportunity to wear many hats, from driving architecture decisions to building out robust payments infrastructure.
- Your work will directly help scale GiveDirectly’s capacity to give cash to more people, across more countries, more quickly, while maintaining a high quality recipient experience.
- This role will report to the Manager of Programs Engineering and work closely with Technical Program Management and Data teams, as well as cross-functional stakeholders such as Finance and Operations.
What you’ll do
- Architect and develop scalable systems for enrolling, verifying and paying hundreds of thousands of recipients globally
- Improve and maintain CI/CD pipelines to streamline the software development lifecycle
- Collaborate with Product Managers, Technical Program Managers and Operations to design and build tools and automation used to launch payment programs across multiple countries
- Debug issues across multiple layers of our stack
- Advocate for engineering-driven investments with a vision for keeping our systems flexible and maintainable to meet the evolving needs of our programs and recipients
- Travel Requirement: Must be able to travel ~1-2 times per year to one of our countries of operation for team retreats or field visits.
Who you are
- Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem-solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.
- Language Requirement: English
- 4+ years of industry experience creating production-caliber software and systems
- Experience with backend architecture: databases, cloud services, APIs
- Experience building infrastructure to deploy software
- Experience with strongly typed, object-oriented programming such as Java, C#, Go, etc. and scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, etc.
- High degree of ownership and autonomy – you proactively advocate for ways to improve systems and constantly leave our codebase in a better state than you found it
- Strong analytical skills and communication – able to break down complex problems, describe technical trade-offs and collaborate with cross-functional partners (e.g. technical program managers, product managers)
- Bonus: Experience using Python and AWS in a production environment
- Bonus: experience with payments/financial software and/or experience with microservice/serverless architecture.
Why work at GiveDirectly
At GiveDirectly, we work to ensure that you have everything you need to excel in your role and on your team, including:
- A positive and supportive team with opportunities for advancement
- A demonstrated commitment to helping all staff develop and grow
- A competitive salary, including bonus
- A robust health benefits plan (exact details will vary by country)
- Unlimited PTO (that we encourage staff to take!)
- Desk allowance and flexible work location.
Method of Application
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