Software Engineer

About the Alliance

The Alliance Foundation is a startup non-profit that enables individuals to coordinate to improve the world. It does so by building online infrastructure and planning actions for the Alliance, a community of individuals who each dedicate a small, consistent amount of time to complete Alliance tasks.

The Alliance is composed of a general body of members and a full-time office.

1. The office plans actions that advance Alliance priorities.
2. Members complete these actions on our online platform.

In no particular order, Alliance priorities are extreme poverty, environmental destruction, the decline of democratic institutions, and dangerous technological development.

Learn more about the Alliance at https://worldalliance.org/guide.

Main responsibilities

We're hiring a full-stack software engineer to develop and maintain our online platform. Development includes building:

1. Highly polished web, Android, and iOS applications.
2. A backend capable of handling millions of members.
3. A full-featured admin panel to support the office.

Our codebase is available at https://github.com/worldalliance/alliance.

Team

You would join a team of 6:

• Sidney Hough (co-founder, previously sold AI startup to Newsweek)
• Mark Xu (co-founder, formerly Alignment Research Center)
• Casey Manning (design and development, formerly Apple)
• Charles Lien (development, formerly Google)
• Grant Hough (action strategy, half-time, EECS @ Berkeley)
• Alex Hockett (action strategy, half-time, EECS @ Berkeley)

Since our team is small, you would work closely with most team members. We currently have a 2-year runway.

Additional scope

Beyond the core platform, we will need software to:

• Enable members to remind other members to complete their tasks
• Moderate forum discussions
• Detect bot activity
• etc.

Research and strategy

For more scientifically inclined engineers: we are looking to hire a strategist with an engineering bent. If the Alliance grows to millions of members, the office will be able to direct large-scale, open-ended coordination. We want to develop a new field that studies: how to optimize the use of time and resources distributed amongst millions of people to achieve a particular goal?

In addition to sociology, psychology, politics, etc., we expect this field will eventually require network science, ML, and other technical contributions. In the near term, related tasks may look like:

1. Automating aspects of action development, e.g. identification of businesses whose policies we are likely to be able to change.
2. Creating software to track various collective action strategies.
3. Performing data analysis to, e.g., understand member opinions, or to identify political/economic leverage points.

• 75% covered heath (Blue Shield of California Bronze Full PPO 6250/65 OffEx)
• 75% covered dental (Guardian 1500 with Child Ortho (UCR))
• Flexible time off policy
• Staff typically work from home one day a week