Experienced Software Engineer

Want to wake up every morning, knowing that you’re helping others who need a hand in life?

AidKit is a rapidly growing social impact startup that provides the technical infrastructure for direct cash assistance. We are making possible programs that are investing in the early childcare workforce, supporting at risk populations and implementing Guaranteed Basic Income at scale. We’re hiring a software engineer to be the 11 or 12th member of our team (4th or 5th engineer). 

About AidKit

AidKit is the engine that non-profits and governments trust to deliver cash assistance to those in need. We replace convoluted workflows of glued together spreadsheets, bank portals, and human tedium with one unified platform to allow organizations to operate more efficiently.

AidKit grew out of a need to scratch our own itch: our team members had raised millions in donations to support undocumented workers left out of pandemic assistance and built AidKit to distribute it efficiently:

“I lost my job due to COVID and couldn’t get unemployment. I didn’t ever think I would be able to receive this kind of help. Receiving this grant made me feel seen, that I mattered. That finally, for the first time, I was recognized in this country.” - Left Behind Workers Fund grantee

Our philanthropic roots grew into a startup, and we’ve scaled significantly. We have now served a wide variety of populations with both one-time and recurring grants, for example:

• Undocumented Individuals
• Unhoused People
• Low Income Women and Families
• Unlicensed Child Care Providers
• Refugees

As of June 2022, we’ve helped our partners distribute over $50M to over 32,000 individuals and families. We are growing rapidly and currently have another $115 million in aid under contract. We are supporting some of the largest Guaranteed Basic Income programs in the United States.

About You

• Skilled in building web applications (Typescript preferred, but not a requirement)
• Willing to jump in and do right by those we serve, whatever it takes.
• Not required but bonus points if have done any of the following:
• Experience managing large scale web infrastructure serving hundreds of thousands of users (or more!). Why? We run some of the largest guaranteed income pilots in the country, scaling from 1 to 1000 requests per second over the course of minutes.
• Experience designing infrastructure that is robust to failure and minimizes mean time to recovery. Why? We serve populations that are in dire need and often low on tech-literacy. If they have issues, they’re unlikely to come back and try again.
• Experience designing green-field projects from the ground up and owning major architectural decisions. Why? We believe that we can broaden our impact by building newer, better solutions to old problems and that requires thinking from first principles.
• You care deeply about the mission of direct aid and supporting anyone who needs help, no matter where they come from.

About the Hiring Manager

As in any job, your happiness and fulfillment will be a function of your manager. Isn’t it wild that in most jobs you have no idea who you’d actually work for?

The hiring manager for this role is Ben Newhouse. Quick bio for him: after graduating from Stanford, he completed a full "Silicon Valley Tour," from starting a (deep-tech) company, raising millions, launching a product and then selling the company. He then subsequently went on to lead ~50 of Dropbox's best (he may be biased) engineers working on Dropbox's core technology. Today, he feels fortunate to be in a position to direct his energy toward AidKit, which brings the superpowers of software to the social sector without dehumanizing those on the receiving end of aid. In addition, he also mentors various startups and students with Neo, a new kind of community VC fund.

About the Role

As a software engineer, this role will be focused on building a high-quality, maintainable software platform for direct cash assistance at scale.

Our stack looks roughly as follows:

• Typescript, React & Tailwind on the front-end
• Typescript & Postgres on the backend (with some Python we’re slowly deprecating).
• Pulumi for Infrastructure as Code deployments on AWS.

At AidKit our engineering team is committed to building tools that give non-engineers the agency to iterate and adapt things as needed, so that everyone can leverage their skills most effectively. In other words, our job is to empower people close to the field with the tools they need to help people—without engineering bottlenecks.

Initially, you will be focused on the operating and maintaining our existing platform, but as you learn our platform, we will be looking to you to build abstractions that allow us to 10x our ability to serve population's in need. In this role you will:

• Build a platform that we can be proud of, one that protects user data, is easy to extend, is efficient to develop on top of, and is documented such that new team members can ramp up quickly.
• Work with the CTO to plan the platform’s technical and product roadmaps
• Handle prioritization and sizing for upcoming technical work.
• Ensure that AidKit remains operational and in a healthy (available) state.
• Assist others in the usage and configuration of the AidKit platform.
• Implement new features as needed for the successful execution of assistance programs. For example: a support feature for low-tech community members that works across phone, email and SMS; a lightweight way for us to follow up with recipients of aid via SMS to confirm they’re safe and in control of their funds; real-time streaming of applications in progress to a data platform that supports advanced queries at scale.

For this full-time position, you can work from anywhere in the United States. We currently have team members in Colorado, Connecticut, California, Washington DC and New York. We currently pay everyone $130K a year. We also provide equity which varies by position and experience. We haven't taken outside investment and are currently profitable.

The application deadline is August 15th, 2022.