Lead Full-Stack Engineer

About CDI

The Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI) is a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to equipping the next generation of Americans with the skills to communicate and collaborate across lines of difference. Since its founding in 2017, CDI has partnered with more than 150 colleges and universities nationwide, offering an evidence-based suite of programs designed to reach stakeholders at every level of a campus—from presidents to incoming students—to create campus cultures of inquiry and dialogue. CDI was co-founded by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the bestselling author of The Righteous Mind and The Anxious Generation.

About the Role

CDI is seeking a hands-on Lead Full-Stack Engineer to be our first in-house engineering hire and technical owner of our learning platform.

You’ll set technical direction and make key architecture decisions while staying deep in the code—leading implementations, resolving production issues, and turning research and product priorities into shipped software. You’ll report to the VP of Product and partner closely with the Associate Product Manager.

A core part of the role is bringing platform ownership in-house: transitioning work from our external agency and helping build the engineering function as we scale (fully in-house or a hybrid vendor + internal model).

You’ll work with Product, Research, and Implementation to translate CDI’s evidence-based curricula into reliable, scalable digital experiences—and to prototype new learning approaches, including AI-enabled dialogue practice. This is a highly visible, mission-driven role with meaningful influence on CDI’s technical foundation and product culture.

Responsibilities

• Within your first six months, partner with Product to improve platform reliability and reduce support load by addressing peak-usage bottlenecks and reworking enrollment, authentication, rostering, and licensing infrastructure.
• Own end-to-end system architecture and technical roadmap for CDI’s product suite: application, data flows, integrations, and infrastructure.
• Contribute hands-on to front-end and back-end code to unblock delivery, lead critical implementations, and resolve production issues.
• Drive and operate CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability/monitoring, and alerting.
• Establish and cultivate engineering best practices (code review, branching, documentation, security)—providing technical oversight of our agency partner and mentoring incoming junior engineers as the team scales.
• Partner closely with Product, Research, and Implementation to translate CDI’s evidence-based curricula into scalable, usable digital experiences.
• Ensure secure and privacy-conscious handling of user and institutional data; work with Product and Operations to align on compliance and data policies.
• Communicate technical choices and tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

About You

Required

• Experience & ownership. 8+ years building full-stack web apps with clear ownership of production systems and architecture;
• Leadership Experience. 2+ years of proven tech-lead experience (running a small squad, owning delivery, mentoring engineers).
• Full-stack, hands-on. Strong front-end and back-end skills (React + TypeScript preferred; Node.js, Python, or Go acceptable). History with Next.js (App Router), TailwindCSS, and Auth.js / NextAuth or similar.
• Cloud & infra ownership. Production cloud experience (AWS/GCP/Azure), CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform / Pulumi), automated deployments, and operational runbooks.
• Datastores. Practical experience with NoSQL document stores (DynamoDB, MongoDB or similar) and relational DBs (Postgres or similar).
• Data & integrations. Experience unifying and syncing data across siloed systems (ETL/transform, deduplication, reconciliation), building user-sync pipelines (OAuth, webhooks, idempotent syncs), and working with GraphQL & REST integrations.
• Security & compliance basics. Strong practices in authentication/authorization and RBAC, encryption, secrets management, and familiarity with privacy/compliance basics.
• Observability & ops. Implemented logs/metrics/tracing, run incident response and postmortems, and reduced operational risk.
• Product partnership & communication. Able to translate product and research requirements into pragmatic technical plans and explain tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Mission alignment: Commitment to CDI’s mission and to working within a mission-driven non-profit.

Nice to have

• Generative AI / LLM experience: prototyping and shipping LLM/RAG features with human-in-the-loop guardrails, cost/safety tradeoffs, and privacy protections.
• EdTech / institutional experience: LMS integrations, higher-ed customers, FERPA/data-processing knowledge, SOC2 readiness.

• Compensation — $160K-$180K
• A Mission-Driven Culture — we practice what we preach, so our work culture is characterized by intellectual humility, continuous improvement, and open-mindedness
• Remote-First — CDI was founded as a remote-first organization, and we work hard to maintain a strong team culture across vast distances
• Unlimited PTO — as well as 13 company holidays
• Remote Work Support — up to $500 reimbursed for home office equipment (like desks, chairs, or webcams) and up to $50/month reimbursed for home internet or cell phone expenses
• Other Benefits — employer-supported health, vision and dental plans, subsidized parental leave, 3% 401k match, short- and long-term disability insurance, life and AD&D insurance, $1,000 annual professional development budget

Proficient in English