Software Engineer

Required

• 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.